Squatters thrive in Prague

A few days ago, it looked like squatting was going extinct in the Czech Republic.



Villa Milada (right on the picture, including one squatting guard on the roof - see more of them: the pretty German woman on the right side loves this particular villa), a building on the boundary between the Trója and Holešovice neighborhoods (map: it's on the former Holešovice Island landfilled around 1900), was apparently the last house they occupied. After years of legal havoc, a well-defined owner emerged and expressed his desire to get rid of the "renters" who never pay anything. After some battles, the building was freed from the occupying forces.

Interestingly enough, you can also see the concrete block on the left side. I have lived there for 5 years, between 1992 and 1997: these are the student hostels of the Faculty of Maths and Physics of the Charles University in Prague. Nowadays, the two tall buildings are reconstructed and pretty (and still able to act as a huge dot matrix). When we're talking about pretty things, here is a fancy "bedroom" inside Villa Milada before it was emptied a few days ago. Click to zoom in:



Does it look like your bedroom? ;-)

I have never even realized that the adjacent old-fashioned building was a squat. In fact, was it a squat e.g. 15 years ago? Some data indicate that squatters took it over as recently as 11 years ago so I can't remember them. So it's just a theoretical fact for me when I learn that they were making noise and that their "free dogs" have killed a few animals in the nearby Prague Zoo.

After Villa Milada was emptied a few days ago, hundreds of squatters protested, claiming that their right to live in any building is more important than anyone's right to own anything ;-), and the Czech minister for human rights, Mr Michael Kocáb, a very good rock musician from the Prague Selection band (see their songs; add more recent songs of his such as Senescence, With a Strange Woman in a Strange Room) that was mostly active in the 1980s, with a semi-dissident status, did something remarkable yesterday.



He convinced his friend to sell squatters the rights to use his own building in the very center of Prague (11 Truhlářská St, near the Kotva [Anchor] mall) for CZK 1 i.e. for 5 U.S. cents. A pretty good price. The owner plans to reconstruct the building sometime in the future. However, they may use it for an "unspecified" period of time. It's not enough for the squatters. ;-)

Imagine how many people, including poor young single mothers with children, must pay literally a thousand of dollars a month for apartments in this area. No one can help those people: they're the bulk of the economy who are needed for the market to quantify the proper rent in a sensible way. But the squatters are a lucky species, indeed.

Besides squatters, "freegans" are another class of freeloaders. The newest episode of The Goode Family, Freeganomics, was dedicated to this phenomenon. See also a review.

A few months ago, Google has sent its vans to map the streets of Prague: the Street View of our capital will be available later in this year. Also, Google Earth now contains (not quite perfect) 3D models of pretty much all buildings in Central Prague (don't forget to erase your cache) which was chosen for its special value. The new squatting headquarters are located just 100 meters from the very expensive area covered by the 3D models.

In this world, one can indeed live a much more comfortable life if he is a member of one of these parasite groups than if he actually creates some values. What do you think that will happen with the society when this subtle anomaly becomes well-known to everyone? ;-)

Buzz Aldrin is a climate realist

Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff were shooting an interview with the second man on the Moon back in April. But when we met in France, they didn't tell me what he was thinking about climate change.

Recall that Al Gore has compared climate-change skeptics to

people who still believe that the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona.

So it shouldn't be surprising that a key "actor" from the movie lot in Arizona is a skeptic, too. See Tom Nelson and The Telegraph. He said:

I think the climate has been changing for billions of years.

If it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favour of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today.

I'm not necessarily of the school that we are causing it all, I think the world is causing it.

Aldrin was also promoting manned flights to Mars.

A very good Czech EU presidency is over

According to 2/3 of the Czech citizens, the Czech EU presidency was a success.

Those six months have helped the center-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) that was largely controlling the first government during the presidency to catch up with the socialists (ČSSD). While they were lagging by 10+ percentage points half a year ago, now they're actually ahead of the socialists! ODS has won the European elections in Czechia and quite suddenly, there are nonzero chances that they could even win the real national elections in October.

It was shown that President Klaus was correct about many things, too. First of all, the rotating presidency doesn't change the actual balance of power in Europe. The Czech officials may have become more visible and they had to show their organizing skills and hospitality more often but they didn't really become more influential. The character of the decisions was largely unaffected.



This video that I uploaded - the #1 YouTube hit for "Czech EU Presidency" - was controversial at the beginning. But after 38,000 views and 54 votes, the average is 5 stars (i.e. more than 4.75 stars). There's nothing controversial about it: it's a good video.

Believe me or not, I was reading everything on the EU2009.CZ website. It was a very decently designed website and the amount of activity was rather impressive. The presidency had to solve a lot of issues along the ways that were determined mostly by the big players. But that included a solution to the Russia-Ukraine gas crisis, a helping hand to cure the havoc in Gaza, and other things.

Just like I predicted, the markets are way above the levels experienced half a year ago. The increase has been near 50% for many national stock market indices. It is pretty clear that the "crisis" has already culminated - or, to be even more modest, the markets already bet that its culmination point is located somewhere in 2009 or so. The "crisis" suddenly looks very finite.

Another thing that was expected was a continuous flow of lies and nasty attacks against the presidency by the politically correct media across Europe. These attacks have never stopped and they have never had anything to do with the reality. The hateful, politically correct journalists should go bankrupt and die of hunger as soon as possible.

Topolánek's center-right government was removed in the middle of the presidency, mostly by the socialists in the national Parliament. While I was irritated by these destructive socialist acts, I would be irritated by them regardless of their timing. They have been trying to remove the government for years and their fifth attempt simply succeeded.

I am flabbergasted by the suggestions of some people - in fact, very many people and most journalists - that the governments should never fall when they're responsible for the EU presidency. Such an opinion flagrantly contradicts the basic rules of democracy. If someone becomes more powerful than he was a month earlier, does it mean that he or she should become unfirable? Wow. I am simply shocked by the people who think so. According to this logic, it was very correct that Stalin remained a dictator when he needed to kill tens of millions of people.

This suggestion also reminds me of the opinions - shared by people like Tommaso Dorigo and hordes of obnoxious left-wing types - that public figures, including presidents, university presidents, and maybe even instructors at universities (and I am talking about Berlusconi, Summers, and myself) should be stripped of their human rights such as the freedom of speech and the basic privacy rights. Wow.

If the basic rights can't be guaranteed even for such people, how can they be guaranteed for others? And more generally, where does the inequality directed against the success come from? Let me tell you: it comes from Marx's books. It's nothing else than the struggle of the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat against all the successful, clever, decent, and handsome people. But let's return to the question whether governments can be removed during EU presidencies. There's no non-Marxist method to justify the suppression of the human rights of more powerful or wealthier people.

The probability that a government is removed by the national Parliament should be equal during its EU presidency and outside its EU presidency. The stakes may be higher and a forced resignation may be more harmful during the EU presidency: but a continuing rule of a bad government may also be more harmful during the EU presidency than outside it.

If a Parliament thinks that a government is bad, it should be able to remove the government - and it should actually remove the government - regardless of the current situation concerning the EU presidency. In my optics, this is a fundamental principle of democracy. The EU presidency can't become a tool to blackmail or restrict Parliaments. And I am emphasizing this principle despite the fact that I strongly disagree with the opinion of the Parliament where the socialists and traitors had become important enough to remove Topolánek's government which was, in my opinion, a good government.

Also, the replacement of the government was no catastrophe even though some people loved to suggest that it was. The neutral bureaucratic government led by PM Jan Fischer was able to continue in all the mechanical tasks - while avoiding any kind of political bias in its activity (which is better than the previous situation for the socialists, and worse than the previous situation for the rightwingers). That's what should naturally happen when a government collapses.

Czechia has handed the EU presidency Pilsner beer barrel (the official beer of the presidency haha) to Sweden, while sailing on the Vltava river: see SE2009.EU for further news (what a chaotic website with irrelevant stuff on it!).

After I have seen the Swedish prime minister who is a genuinely obnoxious sourball and after I have heard twice that the fight against a law of Nature, namely climate change, is his priority, I am so fed up by them that I will try to protect my good mood by largely avoiding EU-level politics for the 6 following months. These people are boring, disgusting, and dishonest opportunists riding on a dirty neo-socialist bandwagon.

Why physics must care about being fundamental

Clifford Johnson wrote an essay arguing that it doesn't matter whether ideas and concepts in physics are fundamental. Needless to say, Clifford Johnson is fundamentally wrong. He seems to fundamentally misunderstand fundamental values and goals in fundamental physics.



Yes, I have just deliberately overused the adjective a bit in order to achieve a special impact on him because he seems to be really sensitive about the word, much like he is sensitive about other terms such as the God particle and the laws of physics. ;-)

Applied vs pure research

Let me begin with this aspect of the discussion. People are doing various things for various reasons. That's true in science, too. One of the basic "polarizations" in science is the classification of research to "applied science" and "pure science". While their methods and logic are pretty much equivalent (or at least compatible), these two approaches in science significantly differ in their motivation.

Applied research is motivated by the desire to use new scientific findings in the everyday life (or at least in the every-year life). With a little bit of oversimplification, you may say that the financial profit of the society in 20 years is the key criterion that tells you which applied research is important.

Pure science is manifestly not driven by the same criterion. After all, high-energy physics above 1 GeV seems to have no practical consequences that couldn't be figured out without doing the hard science. If they exist, they will probably become useful in the far future so that the living people shouldn't even care.

Nevertheless, some people still study pure science. Why are they doing so? Now, please, let us assume that the existence of pure science is more than just a conspiracy to steal a few dollars from the sponsors and taxpayers. ;-) Clearly, the pure scientists want to learn something important, much like they have in the past. The importance is not measured by the profit of Joe Sixpack. What is it measured by?

Pure scientists want to learn the pure truth about the world, and I don't care a single bit whether someone finds these words "inflated". They're not inflated. And how important the insights in pure science are?

At the very end, correct insights in pure science are important according to their being fundamental. What does it mean? To be fundamental means to be connected to the foundations of reality or the foundations of a given field, to be based on basic concepts that are important for most of the work in the field, concepts that are not derived ones or contrived mixtures of others, that are not invented ad hoc, that are not approximate, that have a good chance to last, and that are not designed for a very limited, specialized set of applications and situations.

Fundamental topics are the scientific counterpart of God and His close family in the structure of a religion. ;-) Some of them may be cross-pollinated while others may be internally pollinated but the main achievements of physics are fundamental results rather than cross-pollinated results.

Sociologically, fundamental papers are expected to be needed for many other articles in the future - and they should become more widely cited than those less fundamental papers. It's because the fundamental concepts addressed in the fundamental papers are directly or indirectly linked to many questions across the discipline. That doesn't mean that the number of citations is a universal method to quantify whether papers are fundamental: it is just a particular, very noisy sociological measurement of their being fundamental. The noise arises because people are imperfect because of many reasons - and they're hopefully more ignorant than the future generations. But what it does mean is that at least a fuzzy version of a quantity that determines how fundamental various insights are must exist.

Fundamental vs elementary

As Clifford correctly observes, the adjective "fundamental" is pretty much equivalent to another adjective, "elementary", in most of the existing high-energy physics. If you want to study more fundamental layers of reality, you have to look at small, elementary particles and forces that every object and process is made of.

It has been the case throughout the history of physics of the microscopic world. In conventional particle physics, high energy corresponds to shorter distances which reveal a more elementary layer of the architecture of matter. While the beauty of Taj Mahal is not hidden in the bricks, the glue that holds it together, or the atoms that are inside, the fundamental keys to nuclei actually are the quarks and the gluons that hold them together: Clifford may be surprised but Taj Mahal is not a nucleus and arts are not fundamental physics.

And the rule that smaller things are more elementary or more fundamental may break down at the Planck scale: if you have a Planck-sized object, it makes no sense to ask "what smaller pieces it is made of". In fact, it cannot be made of any smaller pieces because nothing is smaller than the Planck length. The Planck scale physics is the ultimate realm where the word "fundamental" no longer means "smaller than everything you've seen before".

The concept of being fundamental must be generalized in this regime. We must return back to the conceptual issues that are detached from a simple geometric interpretation. Throughout the last decade or so, string theory has found an immense collection of fundamental insights that are fundamental because of other features and insights than the old-fashioned reductionism into geometrically smaller pieces. Objects and processes are often decomposed in terms of more fundamental processes that nevertheless need a bigger space than the composite ones. Locality itself is a derived concept whenever holography is important, and so on.

But it's still important to know or to try to learn which research is fundamental, universal, conceptually deep, and affecting much of the reasoning in the future, and which research is just a solution to a very specific partial - and sometimes approximate - problem. The former category is clearly more important in fundamental physics: but it is also harder to be found. Unlike the partial, non-fundamental results, such correct, new, fundamental physics cannot be produced by a routine process so it is often better to work on a less fundamental topic that is however doable. But when an insight is already and happily made, it matters a great deal whether it is fundamental or not!

Let me say that I agree with Clifford that some people incorrectly think that physics, even in the context of quantum gravity, is about the "search for the atoms" 24 hours a day - and no other question is important. This is clearly incorrect. Important insights of quantum gravity are no longer about a description of "atoms of space" that could be visualized and connected to produce more complicated configurations. In fact, dualities imply that we cannot objectively say which objects are elementary and which objects are composite: the classification depends on the dual description that you choose and the most physically imaginable (or the most weakly coupled) description can change as you move on the moduli space.

But it is still true that some laws and principles in quantum gravity are exact and universal (they include the philosophical insights summarized by the previous sentence about dualities!) - and in this sense, they are universal. And it is damn important to know what they are, otherwise one (or the whole community) would get lost in between a few random trees somewhere in the deep forest (which would become a waste of money for the sponsors).

So indeed, some young people may be led to an oversimplified conclusion about physics by the very usage of the word "fundamental". On the other hand, Clifford is clearly throwing out the baby with the bath water if he wants to suppress the very word "fundamental". Such a word (or an equivalent one) is as important as it has ever been: people must simply do their best to understand (and explain to others) what is fundamental and what is not.

Such a question is often a priori unanswered, but it is usually answered a posteriori. If we could never make any progress in answering such questions, whether something is fundamental or not, there would be no progress in physics. But physics has demonstrably been making progress for quite some time and it is very unreasonable to expect that it would stop. Of course that progress in physics also means that we are learning which notions are fundamental and which notions are not - and this categorization usually differs from the expectations of our ancestors.

Fundamental physics and arrogance

Another, sociological argument that Clifford made against the word "fundamental" is that it is arrogant. Well, a few years ago while I was at Harvard, a new name for the high-energy theoretical group was being invented. Finally, it was called Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. I have always thought that it was and is a very good name - a good compromise between a boring technical name of a data-driven discipline on one side and the true philosophically inspirational driver of this discipline on the other side.

(Note that Clifford must be driven up the wall by this name because he hates both the word "fundamental" and the words "laws of physics".)

Is the name arrogant? Are similar usages of the word "fundamental" arrogant? Well, it depends on your definition of the word "arrogant" and other questions. According to Wikipedia, arrogance is unwarranted pride. Is it unwarranted to be proud about the fundamental character of the basic laws of physics?

It's surely not. The laws of space and time, as described by Einstein's relativity, affect every object and process in the Universe, much like the quantum equations behind the electrons and other microscopic particles. They are fundamental whether Clifford or anyone else likes it or not.

Many great physicists have explained why the fundamental issues make physics so important. In a recent interview, David Gross said that physics is a very imperialistic effort (go to 3:12). He's very right and Clifford is just not getting these paramount facts. Physics is more fundamental than other sciences and some disciplines of physics are more fundamental than others. Being fundamental is not the only criterion that matters but it is a very important one, anyway.

And that's the memo.

Bonus: a theory of everything

The term "a theory of everything" (TOE) is given a special critical treatment by Clifford. Well, this phrase is deliberately ambitious and overstated - but it is very close to the reality, too. Whenever it is used in physics, the phrase clearly means "a theory of all fundamental forces and building blocks of the Universe" that can be used, at least in principle, to deduce any scientific law by pure deduction.

I can't understand how anyone can consider this phrase controversial in any way.

In fact, if string theory accurately describes our world at arbitrarily high energies etc., then it really is a theory of everything, and fundamental physics reduces to the task to deduce the consequences in a better way than the physicists did in the past.

If string theory is wrong, we must be more general. In that case, Nature can't guarantee that we will find a theory of everything or even that we are allowed or able to find it. On the other hand, it cannot prevent us from talking about the reasonable possibility, either - and from trying to realize this big project.

Well, I can't imagine that our world follows no laws exactly. But even if it were just due to a lack of my imagination, I have the freedom to talk about a theory of everything, and its existence is a very likely possibility, after all, especially considering the fact that we may have already found out what it is.

Why ghost condensation is inconsistent

Yu Nakayama wrote an interesting paper,

Forbidden landscape from holography.

It follows a similar "swampland" research direction as recent cute papers by Simeon Hellerman and others. The goal is to find and sharpen general consistency constraints that quantum gravity imposes on the field contents and interactions in low-energy effective field theories in reality (and beyond).

Nakayama argues that theories with spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking, including models of "ghost condensation", are inconsistent, at least in 2+1 dimensions.

The reason is pretty much simple: the CFT2 dual of the corresponding AdS3 theories - which should exist if holography is applicable - would be scale-invariant (because of an isometry in the AdS3) but not fully conformally covariant (because of the broken Lorentz symmetry in the bulk). But Polchinski has shown, using Zamolodčikov's c-theorem, that all 1+1-dimensional unitary and otherwise well-behaved scale-invariant field theories must be conformally invariant, too.

I am convinced that this is just one more example out of many that are waiting for us and that imply that almost any qualitatative deviation from the general features of quantum gravity backgrounds that we observe in string theory has to be inconsistent when quantum gravity is added - or, if you prefer the following formulation - that consistent quantum gravity and string/M-theory is really the same thing.

Ideally, physicists in the future will be able to complete this research program (assuming that the thesis is true, or at least modifiable to become true). That would mean that they will be able to derive the allowed "landscape" of stringy backgrounds just from the general consistency "axioms" of quantum gravity. Holography may be one of these basic axioms - but it may eventually be derived from a more fundamental starting point, too. Only time will tell.

Holography from CFT

Another conceptual paper about holography was posted by Heemskerk, Penedones, Polchinski, and Sully:

Holography from conformal field theory.

The locality in the bulk implies a gap in the corresponding CFT, approachable by a large N expansion. The authors conjecture (and collect evidence) that there's also the opposite link, i.e. that every CFT with a gap has a "large" AdS dual.

Lost while mushroom hunting

In the afternoon, we went mushroom hunting to the forests near Obora u Kaznějova, 10 miles North of Pilsen.



A small abstract of our findings.

Once we parked the car, a worried man told us that he had lost his mother and his small daughter somewhere in the deep forest, several miles from our current location, in an unknown direction. The grandma and the child didn't have any cell-phones. So I operatively took his cell phone number because it was conceivable that we would find them somewhere in the forest.

After an hour, three miles from the previous place, we were indeed hearing some screaming. I followed the noise and as you may have expected, Mrs D. of Starý Plzenec (The Old Quasi-Pilsen City) and her granddaughter appeared in front of my eyes after another kilometer of walking. So we announced the happy news to the Gentleman by the cell phone and directed the women so that they happily met near our car.

As the happy end demonstrates, you have just read the fairy tale about Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother who got lost while mushroom hunting but they were not eaten by any wolf. Instead, they are going to eat three full baskets of mushrooms. QED. :-)

As soon as we returned to our homes, a terrible megarain (and thunderstorm) just began. Fortunately, it is almost over. Did God reward me for the successful professional operation? Well, I am not sure whether it was God or superstring theory but I found a CZK 200 (USD 11) banknote in the forest, too.



Let me compete with Clifford Johnson's blog, asymptotia.com, for a while. Click the picture to zoom in or click here to see eight pictures (press the right-arrow icon to navigate) how to cook the TRF version of a traditional Czech "smaženice" (roasty girl). You start with onion on oil until it loses its whiteness, add the mushrooms and a bratwurst, and at the end, you add en egg. Ketchup, salt, and rolls and butter are recommended. It was delicious.

Predictive landscape of G2 vacua in M-theory

Konstantin Bobkov - who has previously written papers e.g. with Bobby Acharya and Gordon Kane (besides his own) - posted a very interesting paper,

Scanning the fluxless $G_2$ landscape.

He argues that the degeneracy of M-theory compactifications on G_2 holonomy manifolds can be comparable to a googol, depending on the topology of the manifold. Recall that so far, the counting only led to googol-like results in the type II or F-theory compactifications, not the heterotic and M-theoretical ones which were assumed to have "modest" populations. Bobkov argues that the M-theoretical vacua have a large number of vacua, too.

Such a large degeneracy - one that is obtained by choosing fluxes in the F-theory KKLT context - emerges because of discrete Wilson lines and various other topological data (I found it pretty hard to find a clear description what these choices are in the paper). Bobkov says that the dependence of the cosmological constant on these things is nontrivial and pretty random - so their large number can be responsible for the smallness of the cosmological constant via "coarse tuning".

On the other hand, he also claims that these new discrete choices basically don't affect the "bulk" of particle physics (n-leg graphs for "n" positive) much, so except for the cosmological constant, the framework remains predictive in practice. The superpartner scale etc. is only influenced by an effective parameter P_{eff}, a logarithm of a ratio of parameters that must be between 60 and 65 or so for realistic values of the vacuum energy.

At any rate, Bobkov proposes a completely new philosophy about the randomness of the cosmological constant and other parameters - and their correlations. There aren't almost any, he says. The cosmological constant is a decoupled problem. Of course, that was the answer many of us have wanted to see for quite some time - but if his paper is right, Bubkov gives a possible realization how it could occur.

A heterotic paper

There's another paper with the word "landscape" in it today. Jonas Schmidt, in his

Local grand unification in the heterotic landscape,

does the first steps to construct GUT models where the GUT scale is kept at 10^{16} GeV but the string scale is moved higher, close to the conventional Planck scale 10^{19} GeV. Conventionally, the string scale is assumed to be closer to the GUT scale. Well, the first excited states of a string are as heavy as the first black hole microstates in his models, so I don't think that it would be a "weakly coupled" string theory in any sense. That doesn't imply that the scenario is wrong.

Also, in his setup, there are discrete choices, like in the previous paper. But this time, they (especially the unbroken discrete groups) influence the phenomenology significantly.

A new Hořava-Lifshitz no-go paper

Archil Kobakhidze offers a new proof, using lots of Poisson brackets and Dirac constraints, that Hořava's diff-breaking theory of gravity has one new, unwanted, and non-decoupled excitation besides the two transverse polarizations of the graviton in the infrared, and is therefore ruled out.

Firefox 3.5 final

Mozilla Firefox is arguably the most important browser for TRF readers, especially because of the "Operation Aborted" bug that has returned and annoys most of the Internet Explorer 8 users again, despite these four new genuinely funny MSIE8 ads.

Meanwhile, with its 1.8 percent share, Google Chrome 3.0 beta (or earlier versions) continues to be a minority browser (although it's the primary browser of mine), partially for irrational reasons, partially because of the largely non-existent plugins.

Mozilla has just completed the new, faster, and better version of its browser,

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 final: download

It was released 40 seconds ago on the page above. Before you download the installation program from the page above, you should try to update your browser by Help/Update. The FF 3.5 RC3 users won't be offered any update because the third release candidate "succeeded" and is bitwise isomorphic to the final edition.



Click to zoom in.

I also recommend you to visit Tools/Addons manager and install a couple of useful plugins such as AutoPager (automatically downloads "next page" in various search engines, so that it is simply attached at the bottom and available by "Page Down"), CoolIris (a nice 3-dimensional wall with relevant pictures for each page), Flagfox (a flag icon showing the country of the current server), Minimap Addon (an easier way to open a map with a physical address that appears on a page), or the Chromifox Extreme Theme (resembling Google Chrome).

If you're a robot, you may want to try the about:robots URL

A chat with David Gross

If you have half an hour, here's an interview with David Gross from April 2009:



It's mostly about the work at the KITP, the big open questions, elegance in physics, his team's Nobel hats, limits of knowledge, and the generalities of the strong force. Moving pictures of the KITP, including the Gross wing and many string theorists, are included. Painfully enough, David also mentions "physics of climate change" around 5:30.