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Today, it's been 50 years since the assassination of JFK.

The murder took place on Friday, just like today. For generic two years, the probability is 1/7 that a given day occurs on the same day of the week. However, for a 50-year gap, the probability is approximately 1/3 because each of the 50 years shifts the day of the week by 1 plus 11-13 (mostly 12) from leap years (it may be just 11 because about 3/8 of the 50-year intervals include a non-leap year like 1900).



A historical movie from that day, 15 minutes. Death at 6:01.

The shift is therefore 60, 61 (most likely), or 62 days which is 5,6 or 7 modulo 7. For 1963-2013, the case 62 i.e. 7 occurred. So even the same day of the week isn't too shocking – the day of the week is almost as likely to agree as it is to disagree after 50 years. These two paragraphs were preemptively included to fight another conspiracy theory about the day of the week. ;-)

I wrote about JFK 5 days ago but now I want to avoid particle physics.




About 2/3 of the Americans, including John Kerry and Oliver Stone, believe that there is some deeper story behind the murder than a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald. Holy crap. Why are they doing it? I have already mentioned that they probably want to "restore some order", to save their (incorrect) assumption that famous men may only be killed by other famous men or their collectives.




In The Guardian, it is argued that people believe in conspiracy theories because conspiracies actually sometimes happen. This differentiates the believers from believers in telepathy and so on.

I agree that conspiracies do sometimes happen but I disagree that this fact prevents us from concluding that most people believing similar conspiracies are morons. One may estimate the probability \(P\) that there is some big conspiracy behind a collection of similar enough events and compare this probability with the percentage \(Q\) of people-event combinations in which the people believe that there was a conspiracy. If the people's opinions were sensibly reflecting some underlying reality (which isn't quite known), we would have \(P\approx Q\). However, in the real world, \(P\ll Q\). Assuming that you buy my arguments that \(P\) is actually small enough in the absolute sense, it proves that most people who believe the conspiracies must be systematically deluded.

First, the actual story seems so straightforward that I wouldn't normally spend much time with it. The best movie of the incident was captured by the amateur Abraham Zapruder. There were probably exactly 3 shots and The Zapruder film shows everything you need:



The camcorder was running at 18.3 frames per second. It's being said that in the frame 160, there was the first shot that missed everything. After 220, there was the second shot (magic bullet) that hit the governor in front as well as JFK (non-fatally). They react in some way. The third shot at 313 was used to make JFK's head explode which turned out to be lethal. The time between the first and third shot was probably over 8 seconds.

One may reconstruct the trajectory of the second bullet from the holes in the bodies. The Texas governor John Connally was closer to the center of the car and at a lower height and his chest was just turned to the right side. One may still trace the holes in their bodies and they agree with a straight single shot whose origin (from the back) is moreover compatible with the 6th floor of the building where Lee Harvey Oswald is located. The direction where the brain fragments appeared (front) and the direction of the momentum transfer to the body agree with the predictions of physics, too, although the momentum transfer is a bit subtle issue.

You may clearly see these things in the movie. They couldn't really fake movies well at that time. Why would you doubt it? Some people want to protest against a bullet that goes through both bodies. But what's so shocking about it? When one body is behind another, and it clearly was from that angle (it is not too unlikely in a car, anyway), a shot simply gets through both bodies.

Now, take the claims that there was a different shooter, like the driver. Well, the driver theory just disagrees with all the evidence I could see. An even more popular theory is the Grassy Knoll Badge Man. I watched this conspiracy video defending this meme and I just had to laugh out loud. They take a random place in the noise of a picture and argue not only that it contains a man. They can say that he had a particular haircut or hat and a uniform and some of them say that he wore glasses. Holy cow, I don't see a damn thing. It's as noisy a piece of the picture as almost any other in the area.

So some people analyzed this theory in some more detail, using the state-of-the-art computer techniques. No clear signs of a human – or glasses or anything like that – were found. More devastatingly, the person had to be one meter tall if he were exactly there; or he was several meters tall and flying 5 meters above the Earth's surface at a much more distant place.

Great. Even if a really tall human had a ladder over there, one that no one had noticed in 1963, what do you exactly want to achieve with this extra contrived assumption? There was no shot through the bodies that would be going in that direction. So what else than the complete stupidity – or a form of religion that may be classified as a type of complete stupidity – could be the reason that someone still believes the Badge Man Grass Knoll theory?

Quite generally, the very idea that there should be more people involved in this shooting is bizarre. A vast majority of similar incidents involves a single shooter. Think about Breivik and lots of others. Why would someone think that it's more convincing to create a theory with numerous shooters?

There are exceptions. When the Czechoslovak government in London needed to execute a blonde beast called Reinhardt Heydrich, perhaps the main father of the Holocaust and a gangster who acted as if he were a leader of 2/3 of Czechoslovakia for almost a year (1941-1942) just because a nutcase with one testicle told him that he was one, they sent several parachutists including two shooters. This "backup" is what governments or companies do when they want to be "insured" that the maneuver will work. And indeed, the first executer's gun got jammed which is why the second one was ready and useful because he could throw the hand grenade that killed the beast after some delay in the hospital. It worked fine. Thousands of Czech lives (including two whole villages) were terminated in the hysteria afterwards but it was needed for the Czechs not to be a nation of complete cowards and collaborators.

But in the case of the JFK assassination, there is simply no evidence that there were numerous shooters and/or that there was any organization or group of people who would want to increase the probability of the success by a backup plan or a spare shooter. In fact, it's very likely that if there had been several shooters, we would almost certainly learn about some traces the others have left. There aren't any.

So why the hell would someone switch from the minimal, effective theory to the contrived one – one which needs several shooters and perhaps even some synchronization of their shooting? A contrived hypothesis that is not only less plausible a priori but one that also seems to almost directly contradict the empirical data about the shots and their trajectories? I think that the stupidity is the only conceivable explanation.

It's just far more effective for gunmen to act individually if they want to achieve a similar "goal". Without backups, some of them may fail but indeed, they sometimes do. But if someone wants to have a decent enough chance to kill the president of the U.S., the best strategy is simply to try. Individually. It may even be better not to inform or ask anyone else because that could reduce the probability of the success. That's what happened according to all the evidence I see: a lone gunman. People who find it natural to believe that there should be several shooters and backups think like communists and would be lousy managers if they adopted the same philosophy in their management. Some jobs may simply be done by one person. Shooting a man – and whether he's a president doesn't really matter – is an example.

A related issue is the question whether the shooters or the originators of the plots must be famous people. The conspiracy theorists generally believe that the answer has to be Yes. But it's another fact that there are many more ordinary people – even ordinary people with some access to guns – who might want to kill a politician. If it is possible to get to a reasonable floor of a building, they may just give a try.

So by pure counting, it is simply much more likely that the shooter is someone who isn't famous at all. Famous people are just too rare. Moreover, they are more visible. So I would think that a famous man probably has a smaller chance to organize something that remains completely secret than an ordinary man.



A computer reconstruction etc., 4 minutes. See 10 minutes.

On the contrary, famous people like politicians are probably much more likely to be shot simply because many more people know them and either hate them or consider them to be symbols of something they hate. The Earth is a large place and it's often difficult even for the best agent to perfectly protect such a politician. You don't need a very contrived theory to explain such data.

Even though it is "academically plausible" that there is something beneath the obvious and mundane events we have seen, one should understand that there isn't any real evidence and it is just a sign of irrationality to be attracted to unjustified contrived hypotheses and to (loudly) dismiss simple, effective theories that agree with the evidence, especially if one does so repeatedly.

(Of course, Kerry is less of a nutcase. He "just" believes that Oswald was directed by the Soviets or Cubans. Well, I would say that a marine who defects to the Soviet Union is probably extreme enough to think of similar acts himself. Even if Kerry were right, I don't think it is an important change to the story. There were surely people in the USSR who would rather openly say that the U.S. president should have been killed – along with many other "imperialists". And what? They couldn't do it. Oswald could. So even if he had met with some people who told him he should have, why does it matter? He was almost certainly a more unhinged commie than an average member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party so he was still likely to be the key guy behind the murder. Unlike Oswald, the top Soviet officials were sane enough to realize that a murder of JFK wouldn't end capitalism in America etc. so they were less motivated than him, too.)

There are just so many illogical steps and contradictions with the empirical data from that day as well as with some historical data on similar events and with the knowledge about the human nature that these conspiracy theorists commit so that I can't avoid thinking that they're just stupid. But there must be more to it – it's some stupidity that is more likely to spread through the society. It may be the case that most of the JFK conspiracy believers haven't really tried to think about the sad day rationally and independently. They are just absorbing a mass delusion from their environment.

The misconception that famous men may only be "challenged" by famous challengers helps. Let me articulate a related, more religious point: Many people probably feel that death and sacrifice should always have a meaning and it must always be possible to find a fair, comparably large "revenge" for any crime (Oswald's death isn't a good enough revenge). But it's unfortunately not the case. The laws of physics guarantee neither afterlife nor the meaning for our lives nor universal justice.

While Oliver Stone shot another pro-conspiracy JFK movie, Bill O'Reilly was the executive producer of a movie whose main point was that there was no conspiracy. So much for the idea that conservatives are the conspiracy theorists. He points out that FBI wanted a conspiracy to exist at some point but they couldn't find it.

Various specific culprits of the global warming (which hasn't been seen for 20 years) have been proposed in the past: old white men, McDonald's consumers, the Poles, and especially we, the climate deniers, of course: the Koch brothers, Richard Lindzen, Bob Carter, and your humble correspondent, among others. Whenever we speak or write, the planet starts to boil.



But Harvard University's Institute of Politics has created a news and discussion platform called PolicyMic.com (which includes a mobile version boasting an infinite loop of URL redirects). On this forum, playwright Emmett Rensin has finally determined

The Unexpected Culprits of Climate Change Denial

He stresses that the IPCC has proved that in order to save the Solar System, it's time to become full-fledged psychopaths over global warming. Who is preventing the mankind from saving the Solar System? It's the Prius owners.




How do they do it? They do so by creating "tokenism", a false impression that some societal problem is being wrestled with even though it is not. They should burn their Prii and allow the problem to be really solved.




How does America solve the (non-existing) problem? It's easy. It must be fought just like the Nazi Germany – America has to pay 36 percent of its GDP. Maybe, this will reduce its emissions by 50 percent and one of the catastrophic 0.01 °C contributions to the global temperatures will be undone. Instead of buying a Prius, each American including babies has to sacrifice $18,000 a year.

Some of the alarmists are actually entertaining – they are able to bring their psychopathy to a new level that is original and more entertaining than other things that have been repeated by their predecessors many times. The fact that this lunatic is actually serious shouldn't prevent you from laughing our loud. You have the right to make fun of mentally handicapped people such as Mr Rensin because under the new healthcare insurance system, they now have the right to get their psychiatrists for free.

Will the U.S. become Iran's greatest ally?

Any war has seemed extremely far in recent months (if not years) but the situation in the Middle East, especially when it comes to Iran, seems to be shifting rather dramatically even though the exaggerated subtitle was only included to attract your eyes.

If you don't know, there are negotiations about the Iranian nuclear program in Geneva. It's more or less conceivable that they will end with an agreement that will freeze the Iranian program for half a year or so, soften the sanctions, but allow them to keep the enriched uranium and continue in the future (unless a tougher treaty materializes in the next 6 months).



The new Iranian president (R) and his boss (L).

This resolution wouldn't be enough for Israel. The election of the new Iranian president, Mr Rouhani, has made some impact on the impressions of many people in the West, including your humble correspondent, I admit. He looks sort of moderate; his country developed a charm offensive. It's possible they will achieve an agreement with the West that is pretty good for them. The Iranian official press already predicts an Iranian diplomatic victory. The mullah-in-chief promises that Iran won't back up by one iota.




On the other hand, I am increasingly worried that the whole West is just being duped. The otherwise agreeing Israeli at various forums are shocked if you (or I) present the opinion that Iran has become more tolerable after Rouhani took over. They are confident it is just a theater that we are naively buying.




Moreover, there are signs that this is not just the Israeli impression. Fox News just printed an insightful article about the new alliances in the Middle East. The enemy of your enemy is your friend, a proverb says. It seems to work right now because the Saudis and other Gulf (Sunni) states are arguably as worried about the possible Iranian (and Shiite) nuclear bomb as Israel.

Because of these worries, some behind-the-scenes collaboration between Israel and the Arabs has already begun to emerge. These bizarre shifts could lead to the situation in which Saudi Arabia is closer to Israel than the U.S. or other Western countries. Another sub-paradox is that the Western power that could remain a clear enough supporter of Israel is France whose socialist leader Hollande turned out to be quite a hawk in military matters. Do you remember his "conservative" predecessor Jacques Chirac who was the most arrogant critic of the U.S. activity in the region? Now it starts to make sense to talk about something that would sound really crazy a few years ago – the French-Israeli-Saudi front against Iran. ;-)

The remaining Western countries should probably ask the question whether we're not being collectively manipulated by Iran. Is the new "more human face" of Iran something that should affect us at all? Aren't we abandoning a unique opportunity to actually solve the Iranian nuclear problem?



Maybe if the U.S. diplomacy were working more efficiently, it could provide the Gulf states and Israel with the bonds they can't display and strengthen openly and create a huge coalition that would peacefully or not-so-peacefully guarantee that Persia won't represent a nuclear threat to the region or the world in the next 50 years.

The bizarrely diverging evolution of the West's and Arabs' attitudes towards Iran has two related reasons, I think. The first reason is that the West is much more likely to be affected by "nice[r] words". It cares about the P.R. while the Middle East nations are more likely to insist on the natural "biological or religious proximity to other nations or the lack of it". The second reason is that the West is unlikely to be "directly threatened" by the Iranian nuclear arsenal if it exists so it doesn't really care as much as the Saudis, for example.

At any rate, the checks and balances in the Middle East are clearly evolving. The big picture is changing and its small parts are changing independently of that, too. Egypt (and its military), for example, has removed the Muslim Brotherhood from the power again. The Muslim Brotherhood was an ally of Iran and wanted to erase the peace treaties with Israel. Now, when these brothers are gone again, Egypt would naturally become a member of the anti-Iranian coalition.

There's some possibility that the Western countries will sign an agreement with Iran that will be considered as "insufficiently safe" not only by Israel but also by other countries in the region. They may even decide that it's time to act. If a conflict arises, I hope and pray that the U.S. or other Western powers won't enter the conflict on the side of Iran! I am sure that Iran hasn't improved this much, to deserve such a support, not even if it were attacked by others.

Israel's PM estimates that Iran has enough low-grade uranium for 5 bombs. But I guess they don't have the bombs and can't produce them within weeks. In my opinion, a more conventional war of an "unusual regional coalition" against Iran (plus some less important allies) would lead to Iran's defeat.

Thank God.

Poor countries walk out of UN climate talks as compensation row rumbles on,

we heard from the Guardian and many others earlier in the morning. These 132 countries were apparently expecting that they would be paid "compensations for extreme weather events". It seems that they took this meme (so radical one that we haven't even heard much about it in the richer parts of the world) for granted and already demanded a new U.N. bureaucratic body to "oversee" the compensatory payments.

Many of the countries are governed by shamans who believe that thunderstorms are created by witches. Almost all of these countries are dominated by folks who just don't grasp science, not even at the elementary level. The IPCC was produced to support these beliefs – that Exxon creates hurricanes, McDonald's creates typhoons, the Great Devil is responsible for the floods, and the Little Devil (renamed to the rabid dog by the mullah-in-chief today) brought the wildfires to the world. And everyone will be living in a happy paradise once the assets of these villains are confiscated and redistributed.

Well, science says something different. All these weather events – much like the Earth and the Solar System – have been around for 4.6 billion years. Up to noisy fluctuations and some potentially understandable, mild, regular, persistent climate cycles, not necessarily periodic ones, nothing has detectably changed about the frequency or probabilistic distributions of these events in the last several thousands of years. If we improve the theory by the glaciation cycles, nothing has changed for one million of years.

The qualitative nature of the climate has been really the same for 4.6 billion years although in details, it was always changing. But there has never been an era in which extreme weather events were absent. There has never been any "paradise on Earth". And the weather without extreme events wouldn't be a paradise, anyway. Many of the higher life forms wouldn't even arise and evolve in such a "paradise".




A part of the climate industry is powered by greedy opportunists like Al Gore who once saw the opportunity to benefit. Many of the others are however classic leftwingers who just believe in the redistribution schemes. They don't know whether they believe that the richer nations are "guilty"; they want to believe it because it's their strategy to benefit.




Nothing essential has changed about these international conferences on redistribution for decades, perhaps centuries. Richard Feynman once attended such a conference (the overall theme was "fragmentation of knowledge") which has used the "threats of war" to advocate a global wealth redistribution. He wrote:

...There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.

The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”

I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries—that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.

The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking! You’ve gone absolutely nuts! Just take it easy, and don’t take it so seriously. Back away a minute and look at what it is.” So I thought about the conference, how crazy it was, and it wasn’t so bad. But if someone were to ask me to participate in something like that again, I’d shy away from it like mad—I mean zero! No! Absolutely not! And I still get invitations for this kind of thing today.

When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, “This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!

Even worse, at the end of the conference they were going to have another meeting, but this time the public would come, and the guy in charge of our group has the nerve to say that since we’ve worked out so much, there won’t be any time for public discussion, so we’ll just tell the public all the things we’ve worked out. My eyes bugged out: I didn’t think we had worked out a damn thing!

Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines—our second basic “problem”—I said that I noticed something interesting. Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”

Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”

“Uh, well, as a general principle, or … I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?

There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.

Good that there was no IPCC half a century ago and that Feynman wasn't forced to attend the conference of these pompous fools because their pomposity and stupidity has grown so significantly in the last 50 years that Richard Feynman wouldn't have survived the conference.

The silver lining is that at least the Warsaw climate conference was capable of de facto ending sharply and cleanly. But the richer nations that assured the looting nations that they wouldn't get anything now suggested that things might change after 2015. So it's very likely that these attempts aren't over and the pseudoscientifically justified witch hunts will resume in a foreseeable future.



A British terrorist who could have been shot during her/their terrorist attack in the Arctic but instead, she was saved and now released on bail, probably because Putin found her cute. Do you think that she's grateful that her life that she was ready to sacrifice through her unlimited stupidity was saved?

Update Thursday: Poland sucked the very environment minister who hosts the talks, with the apparent intent to accelerate the fracking revolution and destroy the remainders of the Warsaw conference. The lame duck may still finish the COP meeting.

Among the 89 episodes of the classic show Penn & Teller: Bullshit, the 29th one was dedicated to conspiracy theories, namely to 9/11 truthism, moonlanding, and JFK conspiracy theories.



I recommend you to find all the episodes and watch them – it will be 45 hours of intelligent fun!

Just to be sure, JFK was assassinated in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963; it will have been 50 years next Friday. The apparent sniper was Lee Harvey Oswald, an American commie (believed to be a "lone gunman") who loved Cuba and who emigrated to the Soviet Union. Yesterday, CNN listed a dozen of the conspiracy theories about the assassination and suggested that one of them could be right although I didn't quite understand which scenario they endorsed.




In their show, Penn and Teller have been primarily making fun out of many kinds of nutcases. And as the number of episodes, 89, suggests, even the number of the basic types of nuts is really, really large, and all of them have many subtypes as well as several billions of human examples.




Equally importantly, they present the actual evidence that the conspiracy theories (and other crazy beliefs discussed in other episodes) are wrong – mundane, likely possible or demonstrated explanations that easily defeat the contrived interpretations of the evidence used by the conspiracy theorists.

The show is insightful and entertaining but sometimes they discuss deeper points. Why do some people – in some cases people who are intelligent according to other benchmarks – love to believe such stuff?

A lady (12:12) proposes an explanation (see also a man at 23:10). People want to see "a big overriding story", a story with sufficiently far-reaching philosophical or moral implications, as an explanation of every big enough event. (It's possible that I am improving her quote a little bit but I won't claim the whole credit.) People want the explanations and the events that they explain to be commensurable or comparable in magnitude.

They just don't want to believe that something so grand as JFK, the most powerful man on the planet, or the World Trade Center could be terminated by something or someone as tiny, stinky, generic, and irrelevant as an angry Arab man or a mediocre American communist who preferred to read paperback trash over Marx's tirades.

(Even if some other commies were helping Oswald, e.g. some folks in the USSR, I wouldn't be stunned. I don't really care how many commies participated on a crime and I don't think that the Soviet commies were "qualitatively different" from some of their Western counterparts. If the USSR had participated, it would still have limited consequences for the relationships with the current Russia which isn't responsible for everything that was ever done by a Russian national.)

But that's how the world often works. Many great people died because of some infection, i.e. some petty stupid microorganisms that were much less sophisticated than the humans. And many other events or phenomena in Nature have seemingly mundane, low-key, disappointing (for a conspiracy theorist expecting a great story) explanations. The comparability of the demolished buildings or terminated human lives with those of the killers isn't something that is implied by the actual logic or the actual laws of physics and the society. But some people incorrectly believe that this commensurability is a part of rational reasoning.

Because of our Friday and Saturday discussions on naturalness, especially with Giotis, I couldn't overlook the apparent similarity of the sentiment of the conspiracy theorists and those who take the naturalness arguments too seriously or strictly. Why are those attitudes similar?

Well, because the strict naturalness fans identify a pattern in Nature, and the lightness of the Higgs boson is the most important example, and they expect or demand some far-reaching, paradigm-shifting, philosophically deep explanation, perhaps one with huge moral consequences or at least consequences for the character of the future research. (I generally agree with almost everything that Nima Arkani-Hamed says about physics but yes, I am talking about him in this case a little bit, too, and at least our "accent" was very different when we debated these issues.)

But let me tell you something. Just like in the case of JFK, seemingly "clear patterns" may have convoluted or uninteresting explanation. I believe there's really no solid evidence that the explanation why the Higgs mass is so much smaller than the GUT scale has to be a "grand idea". More precisely, the explanation for this hierarchy probably is a grand idea, the supersymmetry, but what I wanted to say is that the explanation why the superpartners are 10 times heavier than the Higgs boson doesn't have to be another "grand idea" anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I do use the reasoning based on naturalness. After all, all reasoning in science is ultimately probabilistic. See e.g. Why naturalness should be expected for the most pro-naturalness perspective on your humble correspondent. However, what I do not believe is the idea that the probabilistic distributions on the spaces or parameters are the most important or most rock-solid considerations we have in science. I do not believe that similar references to naturalness have dictated or will determine most of the insights about science. I don't believe such considerations have or should have the last word, either. There are much "harder", more reliable theoretical arguments and I think that the experimental evidence (if checked not to be flawed) always beats some philosophical arguments such as those based on naturalness.

I am somewhat open-minded whether the "existence of life" (or something like that) could be used as a "part of the explanation" why the Higgs boson is so light – and why other features of the vacuum surrounding us have the qualitative properties we know, properties that seem necessary for life of our type. And this open-mindedness – again, I prefer explanations that are non-anthropic but I am not 100% certain that those will be found for every question – is something that isn't really changing qualitatively once the lower bound on the scale of new physics gets doubled, for example.

Supersymmetry seems to be the only major physics paradigm we know that is capable of explaining the apparently weakly self-interacting, moderately light Higgs boson. The cancellations resulting from SUSY guarantee that the expected residual Higgs boson mass is comparable to the mass of the top squark, higgsinos, and perhaps gauginos. Those may be below a \(\TeV\) or at several \(\TeV\)s etc. so the degree of fine-tuning of \(m_h^2\) (it's the squared mass that appears in the Lagrangian and that naturally gets "almost additive contributions") gets improved from \(1\) in \(10^{30}\) to \(1\) in \(100\) or \(1,000\) or so in the SUSY models that remain viable.

But what does it "exactly" mean that the Higgs mass is predicted "not too be much smaller"? How smaller it may be? Well, there is clearly no "exact" answer. It depends how strong tuning or fine-tuning you're ready to tolerate – effectively, how unlikely event or selection you're ready to allow in the foundations of physics. I am perfectly OK with \(1\) in \(100\) and even \(1\) in \(1,000\). I believe that the number of questions comparably important to the Higgs boson's lightness in physics is comparable to 100 so it is totally normal to expect something like one of these questions whose answer will be 1-in-100 fine-tuned, apparently. But they may exist even if the chances are a bit lower.

It's important to notice that the degree of fine-tuning isn't necessarily a simple function of the mass ratios. Some models with new fields and interactions may reduce the amount of fine-tuning even if the mass ratios are much larger. For example, models with \(5\TeV\) Dirac gluinos may actually be highly natural. Because we don't know the field content and the list of interaction terms, we can't "calculate" the degree of fine-tuning with any precision.

But even if we could, the absence of new physics at the LHC (even at the \(13-14\TeV\) run) would still be a weak argument against naturalness. It wouldn't settle the question in one way or another. Why?

Imagine that the LHC establishes that there is no gluino etc. up to \(5\TeV\) sometime in the foreseeable future. Imagine that this means that \(m_h^2\) is fine-tuned to \(1\) part in \(1,000\). So the existence of the world as we know it, with the parameters we have measured, has depended on a "good luck" that only had the probability \(1/1,000\) to proceed in the right way. Is that unacceptable?

I don't think so. Well, I would kindly argue that because of the results that keep on agreeing with the Standard Model, the LHC has already excluded the idea that a \(1\) in \(10\) and perhaps \(1\) in \(100\) fine-tuning is "unacceptable". Even if you view this \(1/1,000\) fine-tuning of the squared mass as the probability, as a \(p\)-value, its magnitude is still \(1/1,000\). That's not extremely tiny. In fact, we commonly translate this \(p\)-value, using the maths of the normal distribution, to something slightly more than 3 standard deviations.

Even if you view this absence of new particles near the Higgs mass scale as the evidence falsifying the "null hypothesis which is naturalness", and even if you ignore the aforementioned disclaimers that a modified particle content may render much heavier superpartners natural, the null hypothesis has only been contradicted by a 3-sigma bump or so! In the case of other 3-sigma bumps, we would say that it fails to reach the usual standard of particle physics for a discovery. We know why we use these standards: 3-sigma bumps may be and often are due to chance. They often go away.

For a normal proper discovery, particle physicists demand 5 sigma which is equivalent to the \(p\)-value comparable to \(1\) part in \(1,000,000\). In the counting (or analogy) above, this would occur if the new particles (stop, higgsino etc.) responsible for the Higgs boson's lightness were roughly \(1,000\) times heavier than the Higgs boson, i.e. around \(100\TeV\). Only if you exclude superpartners up to \(100\TeV\) or so, something that even the SSC would be incapable of achieving, you could claim that you have the equivalent of a 5-sigma evidence against the null hypothesis (naturalness).

Because naturalness is such a natural thing to believe, at least to a certain extent, I would argue that the claim that it is completely wrong is so extraordinary that we should demand extraordinary evidence i.e. an even higher confidence level than 5 standard deviations. And again, let me repeat that because some non-minimal adjustments to the physics may tolerate even larger gaps and keep them natural, the tolerable gap increases further.

If you summarize the arguments and views outlined above, it's very clear that I won't qualitatively change my mind about the "big questions" such as the "relevance of the counting of intelligent observers" even after the \(13-14\TeV\) LHC run, regardless of its results. The LHC may be expensive but from the viewpoint of "all the physics", it's just another minor step, an improvement of the energy scale by an order of magnitude. There are still approximately 15 orders of magnitude that separate us from the GUT or Planck scale.

So the reasons why superpartners are 10 times and perhaps 100 times or 1,000 times heavier than the Higgs boson may be "a bit convoluted". The collection of reasons may be composed of some issues that are studied in some unknown papers today – or that are being completely overlooked. The neutron lifetime is vastly longer (10 minutes) than the lifetime you could expect – the nuclear time scale around \(10^{-22}\,{\rm seconds}\). We sort of understand why today. But we couldn't have understood those things before the neutron's interior was sufficiently understood. Our order-of-magnitude estimate for the neutron's lifetime could have been wrong by 25 orders of magnitude if we were sufficiently naive.

(Incidentally, would you say that with the hindsight we have today, the failure of the dimensional analysis to estimate the neutron's lifetime – or, more physically, the unexpected length of the neutron's lifetime – was due to the anthropic considerations? Is a long-lived neutron really needed for life etc.? I don't think we are organizing our explanations of the neutron's longevity in this way. In the same way, I don't think it's guaranteed that the explanation for the lightness of the Higgs believed in 2100 AD will employ some anthropic ideas. It's just not necessary even if the ideas about naturalness from a particular era are shown to be wrong.)

If someone has a particular idea how (and how strictly) naturalness should work and this idea was just falsified by the experiment, he shouldn't claim that he has everything he needs to say all the right things about naturalness in Nature. Instead, he should be more humble because he has just lost a battle with the experiments. You don't want to believe such a person if he tells you that he knows what must be the "only other alternative". There are lots of possible alternatives. Only when the more complete theory is understood more fully, we will understand why the superpartners (or whatever new particles exist) are \(X\) times heavier than the Higgs boson – much like we need some precision knowledge and arguments to understand why the neutron's decay rate is 25 orders of magnitude smaller than the most naive nuclear-physics estimates.

In the text above, I discussed the belief of the conspiracy theorists in the "commensurability" of the big events and patterns on one side and the big stories or far-reaching theories that explain them on the other side. A proper, hard-scientific reasoning just doesn't imply that this commensurability is a general law. This belief in commensurability is clearly not justifiable by solid mathematical or scientific evidence; it is partly ideological in character. I believe that this commensurability is intrinsically a left-wing belief, a form of ideological egalitarianism.

But there's one more aspect or interpretation of the egalitarian ideology that leads some people (and I really mean Nima in this case) to say that the null results from the LHC high-energy run would be a great discovery (because it would falsify naturalness as a general tool – and it would even perhaps prove the anthropic bullshitting). What is it? It's the implicit assumption that an experiment is adding the same amount of information per unit time regardless of the results. I don't claim that this is really the reason why Nima says the things about the "two roads" that he does but I do think that many other physicists implicitly want to impose this "quota".

But this "equivalence" is completely wrong. Of course that the importance of an experiment does depend on what it actually discovered – the importance of an experiment always partially depends on luck. If an experiment finds "nothing new" and only improves some lower bounds on masses or upper bounds on probabilities or interaction constants, it's naturally disappointing for the experimenters (and others).

It doesn't mean that we're learning nothing out of an experiment that continues to produce null results. We're learning something. Every time the experimental bounds are improved, and even when some previous bounds are justified by a somewhat independent method, we're learning something or at least getting more confident about something. We may exclude some models and parts of parameter spaces of other models, too. But the information we're gaining is far less groundbreaking than a positive discovery! That's just how it works. It is silly to deny it.

We don't know what the LHC will see in the \(13-14\TeV\) run. I still tend to bet that the likelihood is comparable to 50% (it doesn't make sense to try to quantify such subjective probabilities more accurately than that because there's nothing objective or high-precision about Bayesian probabilities) that new physics will be discovered. But of course that I find it conceivable that no new physics will be found, too. It wasn't found in 2012, either (unless some not yet released paper will stun us).

It's my feeling that some people try to get a "verbal insurance" that would guarantee that regardless of what the LHC will find, it will be viewed as an important experiment. An equally important experiment. They want some ultimate hedge. But nothing like that exists because the importance of the LHC will clearly be greater if some new physics (aside from the Higgs boson that was already found) will be discovered. It makes no sense to question this correlation between the importance and the positive discoveries.

Of course that the discovery of some new physics would open a completely new chapter in physics. It would be exciting. The continuation of the null results will move the physics in the "opposite direction", so to say, but this shift will be much smaller, anyway. The continuation of negative results will really change nothing about the qualitative framework of physics. You may invent new year's resolutions for yourself – that if nothing new will be found before some artificial deadline, you will stop doing A and spend more time with B. But the fact that people may invent new year's resolutions doesn't imply that they're good science, not even if the people are employed as scientists, not even if they're top scientists.

Even in the "most pro-naturalness" counting above, one in which I ignored the dependence of the "degree of fine-tuning" on the (unknown) BSM particle spectrum, it was argued that the absence of any new particles up to \(5\TeV\) will only be equivalent to a single "3 sigma bump" mildly contradicting naturalness. It's too little. If the LHC discovers new particles, it will be rather quickly able to pump those 5-sigma "positive bumps" up to 10 sigma and discover new equally strong signals in other channels, and so on.

Positive discoveries at the LHC would bring us far more information and would be far more groundbreaking than the continuation of the null results. It's just wrong to invent ideologies and hype that would attempt to contradict these self-evident facts.

And that's the memo.

Bonus: naturalness vs renormalizability

A comment about the cutoffs by Giotis unmasked something in the "strict naturalness beliefs" that I consider not just "not sharply right" but, in fact, more wrong than right. They want to say that one should expect the cutoff scale to be "naturally" of the same order as the characteristic scale of the phenomena in your effective theory.

I would say that this question cannot have a universally valid answer but if I had to pick an answer, I would surely pick exactly the opposite one! On the contrary, it's natural to consider or demand theories that allow a vastly greater cutoff scale than the scales of their characteristic phenomena (e.g. masses of particles they predict). These theories are nothing else than the renormalizable theories! Renormalizable theories are those that allow us to set the cutoff scale vastly above the characteristic energy scale.

In my opinion, there is formidable evidence, both of the "easthetic" and empirical kind, in favor of the dominance of renormalizable theories. Whenever we were living in a jungle of chaotic, seemingly strongly coupled phenomena – e.g. the chaotic zoo of hadrons in the 1960s – it was just a temporary situation that would soon be replaced by a renormalizable theory – QCD with quarks or a weakly coupled elementary Higgs scalar field. And renormalizable theories may be extrapolated to much higher cutoffs. (If they're just perturbatively renormalizable, like the electroweak theory, they may be extended up to an exponentially high cutoff scale near the Landau pole.)

The actual accumulated empirical evidence in favor of the proclamation "renormalizable theories (=theories that allow the extrapolation to vastly higher energies) are more natural to be expected than the non-renormalizable ones" is much stronger than the evidence in the naturalness in the sense of "everything is of the same order", I believe! Hadrons and the electroweak symmetry breaking didn't have to admit renormalizable descriptions and many people have actually expected the right explanation to be some strongly-coupled mess. But the right explanation was renormalizable at the end, it seems. For many questions, these two beliefs (naturalness vs renormalizability) almost directly contradict one another.

Of course that we may get to another scale of new physics which will look like a "strongly coupled chaotic zoo" to us for a while. (The string scale or the Planck scale make such an impression inevitable.) But once the dust settles, the resulting winning theory will be able to make big leaps to higher energies again. In the case of perturbative string theory, once we get past the initial floors of the Hagedorn tower and their inner organization, we will be able to extrapolate the theory to "all energies comparable to the string scale" which may mean up to the Planck scale – another multiplicative gap of order \(1/g_s\) or \(1/g_s^2\) or another power.

There's no reason to expect "lots of physics at every scale". This would be a sort of fine-tuning, too. Gaps are bound to occur and if we look at the energy scales involved in the Standard Model (and its effective theories at even lower energies), we know that they do occur. We empirically know that they exist. So at most, I would be ready to adopt a more balanced yin-and-yang philosophy. Everything-at-the-same-scale mushy reasoning linked to the dogmatic naturalness has to co-exist with the boldly-extrapolate-your-theories-as-far-as-you-can paradigm favoring renormalizable field theories and favoring the values of parameters that actually do create such deserts.

The final theory surely must allow the existence of gaps and dimensionless numbers that are "substantially" different from one because we know with certainty that those occur in Nature. So I would surely say that those who decide to believe that "everything must be of the same order" are making an empirically indefensible assumption about Nature. And if they "derive" this philosophy from the effective field theory framework, they're using the framework beyond its domain of validity to derive a skewed assumption that the full theory simply cannot back up. Only the full theory (and I don't have to provoke anyone with the phrase "string theory" even though I believe it's the same thing because none of these claims of mine depends on its "stringiness" in any technical way) may decide where the whole framework of "effective field theory" breaks down – and be sure that it does break down somewhere.

Any particular effective field theory is OK to study the "effective phenomena" and knows about the limits where this particular effective field theory ceases to hold. But it doesn't know about the place where all effective field theories cease to hold!

After four years, Canada abolished the tourist visa requirements for Czechs again. The visas have been introduced and canceled a few times in recent decades.



Judging by the sentiment in the face, this Czech woman probably got the visas back in 2009 when they were imposed again shortly before she was leaving the Canadian embassy.

The good news were announced by Otto Jelinek, the new Canada's ambassador to Czechia (born in Prague, Third Reich), a rich guy, and a former figure-skater. Incidentally, I do think that "binational" (yet loyal) folks are a good choice for the chairs of ambassadors. We are sending Livia Klausová, the Slovak-born ex-president's wife, to the Slovak capital and I support this idea.

It's being claimed that Canada had to reform its asylum system to prevent the abuse of its generous welfare system by Central European immigrants, especially the gipsies from Czechia. It may have been some work but it's obvious that it was the right thing to do.




A few days ago, I was surprised to learn that Canada – which I/we usually imagine as the most welcoming country possible – was actually the least welcoming major country for the Jews after the Night of Broken Glasses.




It's of course an internal question for the Canadians whether they want to allow someone else to enter the country. But if visas are introduced against the Czechs because of the gipsies, it's clearly a racist decision of a sort. And it's counterproductive – one creating many new unnecessary enemies (in Czechia and the EU that sort of began to protect its member country).

The actual problem was that it was easy to abuse the welfare system so it was this loophole that had to be fixed. It could have been abused by many others – and it probably was abused by many others even though the Czech citizens were obviously heavily overrepresented.

In the afternoon, at 5 pm, the historical Moravian capital Olomouc will host some unusual athletes from Canada – namely its soccer players. The Czech representation team is believed to be so superior that if they lose against the maple leaves, the players and the coach will be rightfully derided by everyone.

Earlier than that, at 4 pm, the Davis Cup finals will begin in Belgrade. The Serbs will host the defending winners from Czechia. Radek Štěpánek will face a hard foe in the first match – No-fuck Jock (of) Itch, the world's #2 (yup, I invented the new spelling of his name LOL).



Because much of this blog post was about Canada, I shouldn't forget to mention that I found it important for Canada to "applaud" Australia's plan to scrap the carbon tax. Canada and Australia are similar in many respects but due to their geographic separation, this trans-Pacific echo may influence the international atmosphere, indeed.

Even Western countries and confederations led by much more left-wing governments, most notably the U.S. and the EU, refuse some particular insane plan by Brazil and a group of developing nations to pay communist-style "compensations" because the temperature on Earth isn't at absolute zero, or something like that. Bizarre arguments are used both to support and reject similar bizarre proposals, too. It must be crazy over there in Warsaw.

26,794 Americans signed for the new, socialist health care in October. I thought it would already be mandatory? Of course that if it's not mandatory, people – including the superficial backers of Obama's policies – will avoid it. I can't believe that someone would identify such an obviously losing project as the tip of his political career. In Czechia, we've had various projects to computerize the health care documents (IZIP), welfare payments (S-card), and public transportation IDs (in Prague), not to mention the "second pillar of the pension reform". All these projects turned out to be similar non-events, with almost no one using it. It's almost inevitable.

On the other hand, I just got a "consumer card" of the Czech Post and it's wonderful. I was sending 3 packages and a recommended letter with documents during the last 3 days and avoided some extra paperwork with addresses, received e-mail confirmations that those things were delivered, and so on. Not to mention a minor 5% discount on the post office prices. This is good for me because it works and doesn't depend on the overall success of the project. I would still guess that almost no one will be using it – even though it is so useful. Recommended to all Czech readers, anyway.

Today, COP19/MOP9 began in the Polish capital. It will continue through November 22nd. Yes, it's already the 19th COP (Conference of the [UNFCCC] Parties).

The previous United Nations climate hysteria conferences took place in Berlin, Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn, The Hague, Bonn, Marrakech, New Delhi, Milan, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznań, Copenhagen, Cancún, Durban, and Doha. Next year, they will travel somewhere to Peru. I tried to use the bold face for some of the conferences that were more memorable than others – Kyoto because it gave the world the suicidal protocol, Copenhagen because it was the most important failure so far (around the Climategate time), and Bali because it was arguably the most attractive destination. ;-)



Warsaw: some nice modern skyscrapers behind the staircasy Stalinist skyscraper, a copy of similar buildings in Moscow.

Now these clowns go to Poland for the second time – which is a surprising overrepresentation of Poland, a country that produces about 85% of electricity from good old King Coal. (Our percentage in Czechia is just dropping below 50%, from 70+% in 2000 AD, despite the fact that no Czech tries to paint our country as a "green leader", unlike Germany whose usage of coal remained close to 60%.)

In fact, next Monday and Tuesday, Warsaw is also organizing The Coal and Climate Summit. My understanding is that it will be an ordinary coal conference and the name is chosen to fool the stupid environmentalists into thinking that the coal industry is their friend.




It's sort of remarkable that almost no attention of the media is dedicated to the coal conference – even though coal produces 1/3 of the electric power for the world. The climate hysteria produces nothing and these clowns are "only" stealing about 1% of the world's GDP but they're a big story in the media (and yes, I admit, on this blog, too).




It's sort of remarkable that the climate change conferences are still being organized despite the fact that they haven't reached anything useful at all and it is extremely unreasonable to assume that they ever will. Of course that they haven't influenced the climate it any detectable or demonstrable way. In fact, they haven't even influenced the annual production of carbon dioxide. It continues to grow at the usual exponential rate (with \(e\)-folding close to 57 years). In fact, the countries that avoided silly things like the Kyoto protocol (especially the U.S.) have seen a smaller growth and sometimes decrease of the carbon dioxide emissions.

The climate doesn't care about any of these things, of course.

Imagine that about 200 countries send their delegations to a random place of the globe – which is something like 10,000 kilometers from their hometown in average. They negotiate, they don't reach any results, even if they reached any results, they only harm the economy and achieve nothing else. All of it is a lose-lose situation.

I hope that there is no serious threat of a Kyoto-like or worse treaty that could emerge in Warsaw.



At most, there should be vacuous promises, like in this 2008 Polish parody of Ivan Mládek "Joe from the Bog" 1978 hit of my kindergarten years. The parody is called "Donald Marzy" ("Donald Is Dreaming") and Prime Minister Donald Tusk promises many things to the Poles in the song, not only about the Polish prosperity but also that you will be able to go to the Cosmos by foot. (Polish, English, and [my] Czech lyrics here.)

Australia didn't participate in the Kyoto protocol but in recent years, it became a fortress occupied by the climate alarmists. The recent elections have fortunately undone this anomaly and Australia has returned to its usual common-sense attitudes to the carbon dioxide questions. Politicians generally echo Prime Minister Tony Abbott's suggestion that the climate alarmists are watermelons (green on the surface, red inside). The precise wording that Abbott uses is that "the carbon tax was socialism masquerading as environmentalism". The same description holds not only for a national carbon tax but for a treaty that could emerge in Warsaw and Australia won't join any similar nonsense, we were assured.

Canada is more or less denying the usefulness of similar theaters and this formerly "ultimate" politically correct country is being attacked by some green whackos' criticism.

Czechs and Slovaks have had a pretty bad experience with the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 so let's hope that there won't be another Warsaw Pact.

In previous years, I was sort of thinking about the annual gathering of the climate alarmists for weeks or months in advance. I am still highly interested in politics of the climate hysteria but I admit it was just today when I realized that the Bali-like conference of 2013 is taking place in Warsaw. It seems clear to me that it's not just about me; the importance of these particular crackpots has decreased in recent years.

But their willingness to lie about everything related to the climate hasn't decreased, quite on the contrary. Alexander Ač is just one writer among hundreds who say things like "Typhoon Haiyan was the strongest cyclone that ever visited the Earth" and all this stuff. In reality, if you look at a simple table, you will see that Haiyan was just 21st-35th strongest cyclone even if you look at those in the Western North Pacific Ocean only. The data in the table start in the 1950s so you may say that a cyclone like Haiyan or stronger visits that ocean every other year!

The hysterical claims about the strongest cyclone ever were apparently created when some excessively active imbeciles in the media confused miles per hour with kilometers per hour.