Quantum mechanics is more beautiful than classical physics

One of the numerous unjustifiable and negative adjectives that Steven Weinberg attached to quantum mechanics in an interview was "ugly". It's ugly when there isn't an objective state of affairs at every moment, we were told. Equivalently, it's ugly when the world doesn't obey the laws of classical physics.

The aesthetic discussions are unavoidably subjective to some extent and people's differences cannot be completely settled. Nevertheless, I am confident that his view – and the view of many others who use murky excuses to sling mud on quantum mechanics and its brilliant fathers – is completely misguided. Here, I want to sketch a few dozens of reasons why quantum mechanics is prettier than the framework it has superseded, that of classical physics.

Ralph Cicerone: 1943-2016

Ralph John Cicerone died in Short Hills, NJ unexpectedly yesterday. The cause of death remains unknown. RIP, Dr Cicerone.

He was an atmospheric scientist and, as Google Scholar indicates, a successful one. You may see that his well-known papers are about trace gases, methane, halogens, ozone, florides, bromides, and other compounds in the atmosphere. This diversity differs from the one-dimensional approach of the climate alarmists who want everyone to be obsessed with the greenhouse gases in general and CO2 in particular. With these diverse interests, it should be expected that the person is at most a lukewarmer when it comes to the climate hysteria. And while he has avoided any contradictions with the "prevailing scientific opinions" that sound technical enough, I think that Ralph Cicerone was a canonical lukewarmer. Well, a very senior climate skeptic has called Cicerone "a personal friend and a closet skeptic" today.

L.A. Times claims that he was an ex-chancellor of UC Irvine who studied "causes of climate change". But this is an extremely manipulative description. One may see that his most famous paper as well as 90% of his other well-known articles have nothing to do with man-made (and, usually, any other) climate change.

Weinberg's new calls for an overhaul of quantum mechanics

Someone sent me a three-day-old video with almost 1 million views – Is This What Quantum Mechanics Looks Like? – which claims that some jumping silicone oil droplets on a wavy surface is what quantum mechanics fundamentally looks like. Over 99% of those who voted on this pseudoscientific video have upvoted it. Well, I surely didn't. It's despicable when this anti-science is sold as science.

But I have largely surrendered. It makes no sense to write new explanations why oil droplets are nothing like quantum mechanics because a few thousand people read my texts, only a fraction understands it, while millions of stupid people want to hear something else than the correct physical proofs of the truth. They want something that confirms their stupid prejudices and their fundamental misunderstandings of modern science.

And it's not just this basket of one million of morons who have watched the aforementioned bogus video. As they are getting senile, numerous star physicists are helping to amplify this idiocy as well. Sadly enough, Steven Weinberg has been increasingly fitting this description in recent years. John Preskill recalls that when he was a student of Weinberg's, quantum mechanics was fine for Weinberg. It's no longer so and in an interview for ScienceNews.org, Steven Weinberg demands an overhaul of quantum mechanics.

Hillary, the pro-séance president

Hillary has done lots of illegal things with her e-devices and lied about most of those things – about the existence and number of her private servers and devices, the existence of classified e-mails on them, and many other things. The FBI – whose members said that an indictment was likely – also seems to claim a 99% certainty that the e-mails were hacked at least by five foreign powers.



Hillary and Eleanor are shaking their hands

Well, Barack Obama has lied about the servers as well. That may be a simple reason why he's been trying to bully the investigators in recent days. In spring, he told the TV viewers that he had learned about the secret Hillary servers from the press. In reality, he knew about them, he was sending and receiving lots of e-mail from/to them, and he was specifically informed whenever Hillary changed something about some of her e-mail addresses – six times in total.

While an ordinary person would probably be punished for this carelessness harshly, I still think that this borderline computer incompetence is something that could be sensibly forgiven because lots of people of Hillary's age just don't understand the computers or the need for the security and other things.

I am more interested in the beef and the beef seems much more troublesome. One problem is the corruption through the pay-to-play schemes. In particular, it turns out that the Clinton Foundation and ISIS are twin sisters, funded pretty much by identical sponsors that include the ruling families of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Clinton Foundation has received some $10-$25 million from the former and $1-$5 for the latter.

Aside from the Arabs, Hillary was paid and helped the UBS avoid the IRS. The Clinton Foundation got a part of the money from a Russian uranium deal (for bribes, she has sent 20% of U.S. uranium to "hostile" Russia). She got $12 million for a Moroccan meeting. Disgrace in Haiti.

There were several other things that shocked me and made me understand why many FBI agents refer to Hillary as the Antichrist personified. Even though I can imagine that she will be a president (and pardoned by herself or Obama), I would personally vote for a "life in prison" if I were a jury member.

Matt Fisher: brains may use phosphorus nuclear spins to act as quantum computers

First, off-topic: On Sunday, during a floorball match, I was encouraged to stand on my left foot improperly. A bone [left, base] got really broken, X-rays showed today. (That's not the first broken bone: I broke a rib during the same sport in 2009.)

This modern replacement for an orthopedic cast is thinner, more efficient, and also more resilient. So I can do something resembling walking without crutches. A disadvantage is the extra $30. Compassionate readers may help their handicapped humble correspondent via PayPal (thanks a lot to Umesh who did!).

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Matthew P.A. Fisher is a top condensed matter physicist in Santa Barbara; check his impressive trace in the literature. In the article

A New Spin on the Quantum Brain

in the Quanta Magazine, Jennifer Ouellette describes a provoking or exciting paper (arXiv) in Annals of Physics (Google Scholar) a year ago, the same Brian-Greene-led journal that published some deceitful stuff by Joy Christian.

The question is whether the human brains use some tricks of quantum computation. That could explain why we still seem smarter and more creative (or better in recognition and similar tasks) than computers with existing programs – even though the computers seem to have much more computing power. Most people in neuroscience say (and I tend to believe) that no such enhancement is needed to explain why our brains are pretty good. But a priori, it's possible that the intrinsically quantum operations with the quantum entanglement are relevant in the brain.

A documentary on string-inspired cosmologies

Are bouncing, cyclic, ekpyrotic, string gas and other cosmologies justified by any real evidence?

If you have 46 spare minutes, here's another video on string cosmology and things of this sort:



It has the same female host as a documentary on inflation and both of them were brought to us by Peter F.

Gabriele Veneziano – the founder of the first "stringy" formula in the history, the Veneziano amplitude (unless you attribute the breakthrough to Leonhard Euler because it's the Euler Beta function) – sketches some history and basics of string theory as well as his favorite (and much more controversial) topic in the following decades, "before the big bang" cosmological models.

Hillary Clinton and Peter Woit

Peter Woit, a notorious pseudointellectual warrior against modern theoretical physics, has joined several other leftists in the Academia (including Susskind, Tao, Aaronson) and ordered his readers to vote for Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump.

Woit seems less detached from reality than e.g. Terry Tao but the simple-mindedness, emptiness, and evil of his type of argumentation is still shocking.

In the first paragraph, he says that we don't live in normal times and the U.S. democracy is in a "disturbing state". To sketch how we wants to fix the "disturbing state", he announces that no discussion about his blog post is allowed because "Internet comment sections are a part of the problem". Right, a non-disturbing "democracy" is one in which people never talk and just mindlessly arrive to vote for Hillary-like candidates.

Witten and colleagues favor an ultralight axion as dark matter

...it's not a new idea at all but it's described and analyzed by clear thinkers who know the standard state-of-the-art toolkit to determine the basic consequences...

Edward Witten is often painted as a "basically mathematician".

In fact, it's a description that you may have heard not only from the postmodern critics of science but perhaps even from your humble correspondent (especially whenever I found the number of homotopies and other things excessive for a given physical purpose in a paper he wrote). But I have always appreciated how much he understands both mathematics and physics – including physics that is very close to experiments. I was amazed by his knowledge of deeply technical, experiment-oriented particle physics phenomenology more than once.

Well, a week ago, along with Lam Hui (Columbia), Jeremiah P. Ostriker (Columbia + Princeton U.), and Scott Tremaine (Princeton IAS), Witten co-wrote a paper on cosmology (astro-ph.CO) which was submitted to PRD (the acronym means FART in Czech)

On the hypothesis that cosmological dark matter is composed of ultra-light bosons

I don't follow astro-ph abstracts on a daily basis so I had to learn about the paper from a big fan of Edward Witten who religiously digests every letter that Witten writes anywhere and who went to a vacation – and declared a hiatus in his blogging – because he needs to read the paper in detail. Well, this fan is also a big fan of supersymmetry and string theory whenever he's not drunk. His name is Tommaso Dorigo. Well, the Italian wine is good – I mean good enough for the Italians.

Climate Hustle: a wonderful climate change eye-opener

Finally, I had the opportunity to watch Climate Hustle, a documentary on the climate panic hosted by Marc Morano, the editor who runs ClimateDepot.com, the Drudge Report among the climate websites. It's great and I recommend at least some of you to order the DVD(s) or Blu-rays.



A trailer for the 80-minute film. A shorter one. More Hustle-related videos.

The documentary is witty, intelligent, ordered, balanced and original when it comes to the separation to the topics and selection of the talking heads who are interviewed. In particular, I think that Marc Morano is especially proud that a large part of his sources of wisdom are politically left-wing. (Well, I think that the climate hysteria has become such an important building block in the left-wing group think that most of the leftists could refuse to consider the climate realists as fellow left-wingers.) As the title indicates, the viewers are shown various card tricks, the shell game, and con men doing similar things.

I don't want to tell you any details because it could subtract from your joy when you watch the film because many of these things are funny, indeed.

FBI and Hillary: some question marks

In July, the FBI ended the investigation of Ms Hillary Clinton because of her apparent violation of computer security regulations when she was the U.S. Secretary of State. She must have felt very happy. But three days ago, the FBI director James Comey restarted the criminal investigation to the e-mails.

Why did he do so? The most convincing answer is that the FBI found 650,000 new e-mails on the laptop of a friend of Hillary's, convicted pedophile Anthony Weiner. It seems rather likely – and someone may already know – that many of the e-mails on Weiner's laptop were classified. And some of them could have belonged to the set of 30,000 e-mails that Hillary has deleted from her computers.

The FBI employees will have to go through this huge body of the text in coming weeks. It won't be easy because the e-mails are probably mixed with photographs of Weiner's sexual organs in knots of various topologies that he was generously sending to his 15-year-old "girlfriend" at the same time when he was receiving mails from Hillary's office – and yes, they were e-mails with @state.gov addresses, the investigation has already shown. Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, is a close Clinton aide. Only recently, Abedin and Weiner announced that they want to separate. Both Abedin and Weiner are probably cooperating with the FBI at this point, to get a deal for themselves.

So yes, I do think that some new damning evidence has emerged. But it's plausible that the restart of the investigation has nothing to do with any new evidence. When the investigation was stopped in July, Comey was criticized by his immediate boss – his wife (who clearly isn't too pro-Hillary) – and lots of FBI employees resigned. They were probably convinced that the evidence had already been found that Hillary was guilty and they have thought that the FBI was attempting to whitewash her or cover her crimes.

So the investigation could have been restarted simply because Comey's environment has convinced him that the end of the investigation was a grave mistake and he was simply fixing the mistake. He may have felt that the reopened investigation was needed to save the FBI and his marriage, too.

DiCaprio's new climate movie is truly pathetic

Hours ago, National Geographic released the new 95-minute-long movie "Before the Flood" created by Leonardo DiCaprio on their YouTube channel:



DiCaprio is facing trouble because they caught him when he was misappropriating a rainforest fund in an international money laundering scandal so he surely hopes that this movie will help him to decriminalize himself.

It's probably the most superficial movie on the climate issue that has been released so far, beating even No Pressure 10:10, An Inconvenient Truth, The Times of the Stupid, 2055, and many other "masterpieces". DiCaprio never goes beyond the manipulative one-sentence slogans that everyone must have heard about one million of times. What is annoying is that DiCaprio isn't just a fool. He is a pompous fool and that's the kind of creatures that I simply cannot stand.

So he could afford to fly to many corners of the world including the polar regions and has befriended many famous or notorious people. But none of these things implies that he has a clue what are laws that the climate actually obeys and what's going to happen with it – a trivial fact that he implicitly tries to obfuscate all the time.

He must be right when they paid for a helicopter to go here or there, he wants millions of stupid viewers to think, and some of them will.

Witten's autobiographical lecture in Japan

V. H. Satheeshkumar has brought my attention to an 8-page document

Adventures in physics and math (a commemorative popular lecture)

in Witten's folder of a server at Princeton's IAS. It's a lecture Edward Witten gave somewhere in Japan – but I don't know when he gave it.



Those 8 pages are large and dense – maybe designed to save the paper and forests. (When I was printing lectures, I surely liked to save the paper – and time of printing – as well. An example.) I recommend you to read it because the talk is very interesting. Below, you may find just some sketches of the information from the talk.

Czechoslovakia's 98th birthday: Klaus' speech

I realize that these utterly national topics attract a very small number of readers but I do think that there are – and there should be – people in the West who are following things like that in some detail and someone should translate such things. You may learn how the historical events are being framed in the context of the ongoing political developments including the EU and the migration wave.

Czechoslovakia was founded 98 years ago, on October 28th, 1918, on the ruins of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. President Zeman had a celebration at the Prague Castle where he named new generals etc.



Because the Prague Café was offended when he decided not to award a Canadian Czech Holocaust survivor George Brady (whom I have never heard of) because his nephew, minister Herman, met Dalai Lama (while Zeman wants to keep friendly relationships with China) – a story that is insanely overreported given its absolute insignificance (which doesn't mean that I would behave in the same way as Zeman) – the Prague Café organized a "competing" event at the Old Town Square.

Ex-president Klaus attended an event at the National Memorial at the Vítkov Hill (see the photograph above), a place that the heretical Hussites defended in the famous 1420 battle against the much stronger crusaders. The neighborhood beneath the hill was named Žižkov after Mr Jan Žižka, the Hussite "general" who led the 1420 victory.

Here is a translation of Klaus' speech – which is obviously and by far the best speech that was offered to the Czech audiences on the today's anniversary. The Czech original and a video are available.