android jailbreak

In a discussion about the reasons of the accelerated expansion of the Universe (see also the first thread), a reader named BBB proposed that I was misunderstanding the goal of Carroll's claims that it's "wrong" to say that the negative pressure is the cause of the acceleration. Carroll's word "wrong" in "wrong way" doesn't necessarily mean that the physics is wrong, BBB argued; he may just say that it's "wrong" pedagogically and a completely different explanation "should" be presented instead.



Well, I think it doesn't matter for the indefensibility of Carroll's attitude. In fact, I think it's even worse when wrong claims are sold as physics to many people – while teaching or explaining physics to the laymen and beginners. When an individual believes a wrong idea about physics, he has the right to do so; no one is really infallible and the problem may be "localized". But when someone starts to teach wrong ideas as if they were physics, he is harming the whole society.

I will continue to use the would-be controversy about the "cause of the accelerated expansion" as my example – although I could think of hundreds of other examples that would be equally if not more apt and urgent. I am sure that Carroll must misunderstand some of the basic physics – that his proposal is not just about the obsession to spread lies among the laymen – but I will nevertheless pretend that I believe that he actually understands the physics and he only wants to make it "more popular".




Let's roll. Since the late 1990s, we have known that the expansion of the Universe isn't decelerating, as most cosmologists expected (because gravity is attractive and if you throw an apple into the clouds, it will be decelerating as well), but it is accelerating. What's the reason of the acceleration? The right answer is:

Relativity teaches us that the mass density – the only source of gravity in Newton's picture – is just one "component" of a "tensor" which has many components including the momentum density and the flux/current of energy and the flux of momentum (pressure etc)., the "stress-energy tensor". That's analogous to the insight that the total energy/mass is the time component of the energy-momentum 4-vector. Because these components are related by symmetries, all of them must have some impact on the curvature of the Universe.



This \(4\times 4\) table represents the components of the stress-energy tensor \(T_{\mu\nu}\). The numbers get mixed up with others in the table whenever one translates the observations of one observer to the coordinate system of another observer who is moving relatively to the first one.

The acceleration of the expansion is a property of the "curvature of the spacetime" and equations of GR show that it depends not only on the mass density \(\rho\), like Newton's gravity would, but on the combination \((\rho+3p/c^2)\). So a positive pressure, like the pressure inside a gas or a liquid, has the effect of increasing the gravitational attraction, i.e. it makes the Universe decelerate and ultimately shrink faster than we would expect just from \(\rho\).

On the contrary, we may theoretically imagine an environment with a negative pressure \(p\); after all, even ordinary solids may be either squeezed or stretched. If \((\rho+p/3c^2)\) is negative as well, the rate of the expansion will actually increase with time. We will get an accelerated expansion. So the evidence for the acceleration is the evidence that \((\rho+3p/c^2)\) is negative. The detailed evidence is compatible with the assumption that \(\rho\gt 0\), \(p=-\rho\). The latter is the relationship that holds for Einstein's "greatest blunder", the cosmological constant. That's sufficient for having \((\rho+3p/c^2)\lt 0\). More generally, environments filling the empty outer space which obey \(p=-\rho\) "approximately" are known as "dark energy". The adjective "dark" means that this environment contains no particles that would interact electromagnetically i.e. that would emit light. We can't see the "substance" filling this medium.

Carroll doesn't like the right explanation.




He calls this right explanation "the wrong way" for the following would-be reason:

[I]t’s not the slightest bit of help in bringing people to any real understanding. It simply replaces one question (why does dark energy cause acceleration?) with two facts that need to be taken on faith (dark energy has negative pressure, and gravity is sourced by a sum of energy and pressure). The listener goes away with, at best, the impression that something profound has just happened rather than any actual understanding.

Indeed, it's sometimes being said that when we answer a question in science, five new questions arise. In this case, the layman got an answer and just two mysterious facts – according to Carroll's counting – appeared. This is the normal situation for anyone who is studying and learning science. It's actually a reason why we learn and study.

There are so many problems with the philosophy behind Carroll's criticism that I don't know where to start. First, the extra two facts that the right explanation needs are true and important. A layman or beginner probably fails to see their importance or relevance for the question of acceleration from the beginning but that doesn't change the fact that these two insights are true and important. It's important to understand than in GR, the whole stress-energy tensor (including pressure) and not just the mass density affect the gravitational field; and it's important that we know viable physical theories (or concepts) that predict that the vacuum may have a negative pressure. If someone fails to grasp any of these points, he just can't be understanding why the Universe is accelerating according to modern physics.

Now, a layman – a listener – may legitimately fail to grasp anything or everything. It's not his job, after all. In that case, he will indeed end up with the impression that something profound has just happened but he doesn't actually understand what has happened. But that's the best possible outcome of the teaching after a full understanding! In particular, it's much better than the scenario in which the layman learns a completely wrong "answer" and is led to believe that it's the ultimate answer and he doesn't need anything else, anything deep. One does need that if he wants to understand the true reason behind the acceleration.

It's great if the layman gets the impression that something profound has happened because, you know, something profound has indeed happened! We usually use the term "relativity" for the body of these profound insights. We even celebrate Albert Einstein because he was the most important man who helped to find these profound insights!

It's also deeply misleading to say that the "two facts have to be taken on faith". That's just not how science works. These facts are believed to be true because there's very strong evidence – empirical evidence as well as derivations and calculations – supporting these two facts. It is dishonest for someone to describe important scientific insights as "faith" just because he finds them difficult (or because he finds them hard to explain to others). Science is not just about the faith. These are important scientific facts whether someone understands them or not.

The dark energy's having negative pressure is pretty much its defining property. Someone claiming to understand the concept of "dark energy" without knowing that it has negative pressure is dangerously deluded. In the same sense, the importance of the whole stress-energy tensor for the spacetime curvature is a basic implication of relativity (even special relativity). Special relativity clumps various quantities to 4-vectors and tensors and it says that the components of the 4-vectors or tensors behave in qualitatively analogous ways, ways that are related by symmetries. Time mixes with space, the total energy/mass mixes with the total momentum, the energy density mixes with the momentum density or the pressure and the stress, electric fields mix with magnetic fields when you switch to a different reference frame. That's also why the pressure must influence "something about the spacetime curvature" if the mass density can do it. This fact follows from the Lorentz symmetry or from the principle of relativity, if you wish. It is profound, indeed.

One doesn't understand relativity at all if this basic insight (about the relativity's ability to link the fate of previously independent quantities) is unfamiliar to him. It's OK for the society if he doesn't understand relativity – most people don't – but it's dangerous if he is led to believe that he has understood the essence of relativity or dark energy or the acceleration of the rate of the cosmic expansion if he clearly hasn't. It's important for everyone, experts and the laymen, to realize that they don't understand everything if they don't understand (and no one does, and it's true especially for the laymen). So if an "explanation opening new questions" leads to this feeling, it is a good outcome, too.

It may sometimes be hard to explain scientific concepts and discoveries – not only because they depend on numerous facts and their relationships and sometimes on difficult maths but also because they contradict some "intuition", some knee-jerk reactions of the beginners, preconceptions that people have before they learn the right answers. But to overcome these things is the mission of teaching and explaining – in some sense, it is the only mission. It's what teaching and explaining is all about. If we had known almost everything (or everything important) from the beginning, we wouldn't have to study and learn.

In particular, physics and cosmology isn't being explained with the purpose to make someone "feel good" whatever it costs. There are surely easier ways for most people to "feel good". If the "good feelings" are compatible with a successful explanation of physics or cosmology, it must be a "good feeling" about having learned something that is actually true. A person who loves science and learning probably likes to correct his invalid expectations and misleading preconceptions. Some people don't like to learn science – and they don't like to be told that their beliefs were wrong, either. But that changes nothing about the fact that teaching or explaining science is impossible without challenging and ultimately defeating the listeners' wrong expectations! That may sometimes be unpopular but it is critically needed.

Sean Carroll is among those who wouldn't hesitate for a second to bastardize science, to sell complete bullshit as physics if it helps him, if it makes him more popular among the stupid people. But by doing so, he is not popularizing physics. He is abusing, bastardizing, and contaminating physics and cosmology for the purpose of his own benefits. Such dirty populists should be spitted upon and pissed upon by all the people who have been decently educated, especially by all the aristocrats.

These conclusions are extreme because I was writing them under the aforementioned assumption that Carroll understands the right reasons and he's just proposing the wrong explanations to make "life easier for the laymen". The truth is somewhat different; much of the reason behind his delusions is that he misunderstands much of the basic physics himself. In that case, the right criticism of Carroll is less about his immorality and more about his stupidity and incompetence.

Let me copy the final paragraphs that contain a wrong explanation that Carroll calls "the right way":

You notice a couple of nice things about this [first Friedmann] equation. First, the pressure doesn’t appear. The expansion rate is simply driven by the energy density \(\rho\). It’s completely consistent with the first equation [the second Friedmann equation], as they are related to each other by an equation that encodes energy-momentum conservation, and the pressure does make an appearance there. Second, a constant energy density straightforwardly implies a constant expansion rate \(H\). So no problem at all: a persistent source of energy causes the universe to accelerate.

Banning “negative pressure” from popular expositions of cosmology would be a great step forward. It’s a legitimate scientific concept, but is more often employed to give the illusion of understanding rather than any actual insight.

Everyone who understands GR knows that this is just plain bullshit. The sign/existence of the acceleration is dictated by the quantity \((\rho+3p/c^2)\) and its sign. If it is negative, the expansion rate is increasing. If it is zero, the expansion rate is constant. If it is positive, the expansion rate is negative and the Universe is decelerating (as expected from attractive gravity).

It is just not true that the acceleration – and whether or not the expansion may slow down, stop, and revert in the future – depends on \(\rho\) only. The right quantity it depends upon is \((\rho+3p/c^2)\). Anything less complex than that is simply a lie. In particular, it's also impossible to identify the conditions for the acceleration with a property of the time derivative \(d\rho/ dt\).

It is not true that a constant energy density is necessary for the acceleration. After all, the energy density in our Universe is still decreasing (because the contribution from the dark matter and the visible matter is decreasing). The Universe might even be filled with stuff that has a constant \(p/\rho c^2\), for example by the cosmic domain walls with \(p/\rho c^2=-2/3\), and the energy density will still decrease while the expansion rate will accelerate!

Even if you neglected the fact that Carroll's constancy fails when \(p/\rho c^2\) is between \(-1\) and \(-1/3\) which are enough for an accelerated expansion, the comment about the "constant \(\rho\)" only captures one property of the cosmological constant which is in no way "the cause" of the acceleration. Carroll's "right way" is just like saying that Italy is a capitalist country because they have the Alps. They're not really the main nation that has the Alps, the Alps are neither necessary nor sufficient for capitalism, and they just have nothing to do with the question. Carroll's non-explanation doesn't explain why the mass density is capable of staying constant or decreasing more slowly than the dust's mass density – the reason for that is all about the negative pressure, too. Einstein's equations still imply a "covariant conservation of the stress-energy tensor" which means that the energy density can't evolve arbitrarily – the evolution is dictated by the pressure.

Similarly, it is not true that a constant energy density is a sufficient condition for the acceleration, either. An empty Universe with \(\Lambda=0\) has \(\rho=0\) which is constant but it is not accelerating. A negative-cosmological constant Universe has \(\Lambda\lt 0\) and \(\rho=\Lambda\lt 0\) and its expansion is even strictly decelerating, not accelerating. Carroll's claims that only the energy density and its persistence matter is just wrong in every interpretation. It's clear that if the right condition involves the pressure, you can't just eliminate it without spoiling the validity of the proposition.

And the whole "desire" to eliminate the pressure from the explanation (despite the pressure's critical importance) is completely pathological. The laymen should be led to think relativistically and in relativity, the pressure \(p\) is exactly as simple, legitimate, and natural as the mass density \(\rho\) – they're components in the same tensor. This relationship between \(p\) and \(\rho\) is not only true; it's also deeply spiritually satisfying; one can "feel" some of Nature's elegance and sexiness through similar insights. A listener who has a chance to understand modern physics will ultimately be happy about the right explanation. A priori, a layman might think that it's "simpler, prettier, and more natural" if only the energy density matters. But relativity with its symmetries should teach him that Nature respects a very different (and in this sense opposite) type of simplicity, beauty, and naturalness. All components of a 4-vector or tensor matter – they matter "qualitatively equally"; the equations showing their influence have totally analogous (if not "the same") form.

But let me spend some more time with the "moral dimension" of Carroll's sick claims. We hear that the right explanation is often employed to "give the illusion of understanding rather than any actual insight". This assertion displays the degree of enhanced arrogance that the Jews call "chutzpah" (another example: a murderer of his parents insists that he is found innocent because he is an orphan) because it's exactly (and only) Carroll's would-be explanation that explains nothing and gives the illusion of understanding rather than any actual valid insight.

In fact, it was designed with this very purpose in mind. It was designed so that the listeners don't have to ask any additional questions. Carroll was very open about his motives. With Carroll's wrong explanation, the debate is over. Everything is just due to the mass density, like in Newton's theory, we don't have to learn anything new, relativity doesn't force us to modify any opinions, there is nothing "profound" about relativity, and I am [Sean Carroll is] so great that I have [Carroll has] explained it so cleanly while others are muddled minds who have to bother you, dear listeners, with unnecessary complicated concepts such as pressure and dark energy.

Except that you haven't explained a damn thing, Mr Carroll, everything you say about the actual causes of the acceleration is wrong, and by your pumping of self-confidence into the minds of people who have been explained nothing about the actual physics, you are producing new pompous fools and aggressive idiots who understand nothing, who think that they never have to learn anything new or modify their opinions, but who still act as if they were understanding everything.

And that is very harmful to their environment, that is very harmful to the present and to the future of their communities and the human society at large. It's a much better idea to encourage the kids to have parties all the time (or whatever they like) than to teach them wrong physics.

...and in some sense, its goal is to tame this creativity and render it unnecessary...

Sabine Hossenfelder wrote an essay titled

Does modern science discourage creativity?

that displays a deeply emotional, anti-scientific sentiment that I am encountering almost every day. Many people like her seem to hate what science in general and theoretical physics in particular – and especially theoretical physics of the recent 40 years or so – actually is and means.

It seems to me that many people like her who are employed as scientists suffer because they don't really like it. They don't like the "true identity of science" and the features by which it differs from other occupations or belief systems. And it seems to me that the affirmative action is not only harming the efficiency of many fields but it is also reducing the happiness of the people whom it superficially helps because it often forces them to spend their lives with something they don't intrinsically like.

She starts by saying that she has just read a new novel by Neil Gaiman and she feels "jealous of the freedom that a fantasy writer enjoys while turning ideas into products". Be sure, I love arts, movies, music, and visual arts. I've been trained as a piano player for some years and like many genres, I have inherited no genes from my grandfather who was an academic painter, OK... let me stop with that rubbish.

But as Sabine realizes, science has different rules and even if we talk about creativity in science, it is a different creativity than one that is helpful in arts.




Every meaningful result in science is "incremental" to a certain extent. Assuming a sufficiently inclusive definition of the adjectives, every important enough insight is "ingenious and revolutionary", too. The separation is mostly subjective and claims that some advances "totally and qualitatively differ from others" are just some hype for the laymen. Some of the recent insights that I found most ingenious, shockingly enough simple, original, and creative – like the ER-EPR correspondence – lead to a minimal interest of the folks who otherwise love to blabber on creativity.

The only conclusion I am able to make out of this situation is that they don't actually give a damn about the genuine scientific creativity, one that may exist and exists in the real world. They refer to creativity in order to vent their personal dissatisfaction with science – and all the evidence that I can see suggests that the dissatisfaction proves a problem on their side, not a problem on the side of science.




It seems clear to me that many such people would prefer to be artists but they weren't sufficiently talented for arts so they became scientists. A part of the institutionalized science has apparently become a dumping ground for failed artists.

I have never shared any of these negative sentiments and "jealousy" because the types of creativity behind arts and science are different in some important respects and I have always preferred the scientific type of creativity. I have always found it more spiritually fulfilling.

In particular, theoretical physics has a vision of unification and simplification of everything there is. I've been fascinated by this vision – and by the successes that physics has already achieved while turning this vision into reality – since my childhood. There is some sense in which this unification is the "opposite thing" than creativity as understood in arts.

What do I mean?



Lukáš Kmiť (the Slovak viola player in an orthodox Jewish synagogue in Eastern Slovakia) needed some special creativity and sense of humor to respond to the Nokia ringtone in this way although, as Gordon (who sent me the video) points out, most musicians at this level can improvise like that.

Joanne Rowling is apparently a great writer. She's hugely successful but I think it isn't just some worthless fad; she probably deserves a Nobel prize in literature, too. But she's been spitting out all these Harry Potters and Rubeuses Hagrids and Lord Voldemorts and other half-giants, dark wizards, and their random fantastic abilities and features and stories that have impressed millions – and this is what is behind the creativity of fiction writers.

While I often enjoy a good movie (or, much less often, a book) of this kind, I've been always discouraged by the fact that there's so much of it – so many random heroes in books and tons of other things that people have already created and keep on creating. I feel that we are lost in this giant pile of stuff – or to say the least, I feel lost in this giant pile of stuff that may grow arbitrarily large.

Science in general and physics in particular, like religion, provides us with a loophole. It organizes everything. It shows us that there are general laws. It places all these laws and patterns at the tip of the pile. It tells us how we can overlook the details and see the important things – where the importance is quantified according to the scientific perspective. In this way, it cleans everything.



Sorry, fat man. One of your pals had to become a symbol of the stuff that physics renders non-fundamental and redundant.

By downgrading Rubeus Hagrid to a fat component of the noise that you may overlook (but that's still safely implied and governed by both the Standard Model and string theory), science gives us a new type of satisfaction, cures the uncomfortable feeling of surfeit, and makes some of us happy. It's important to notice that these changes of our view of the world act pretty much in the opposite way than creativity of writers of fiction.

Of course that science has involved the discovery of new things, and I mean both theoretical and experimental discovery. In this sense, science was often "growing extensively". But there is a sense in which even the extensive growth of the science is just an intermediate phase in the struggle for the ultimate goal which is to develop an ever more rigid, more compact, more accurate, more universal, and more unified understanding of Nature.

New features of Nature that humans observed for the first time at some point ultimately have a purpose. It is not a purpose in the anthropomorphic, teleological sense. It is their ability to make a more far-reaching theory of the future consistent. At some moment, magnetism was new but it had to be there because electricity exists and relativity would be broken if there were no magnetism at the same moment. Physicists have only learned about this "purpose" much later. We don't know when the unification of concepts will occur, when some random features of Nature will find their meaning, and we're not even sure about the existence of a meaning of each subtle feature of Nature we have learned. But we know about the general trend of theoretical physics to give us ever deeper and more solid understanding of the Universe.

Does this progress in science require creativity as understood by artists? Or Sabine Hossenfelder? Does it support creativity? I don't know and I don't really care because "creativity" isn't the purpose of science. The purpose of science is to learn the truth about Nature. So someone who puts the ill-defined notion of "creativity" at the top doesn't really like science and its defining goal.

Surprise me, but not too much

Does the progress in theoretical physics "encourage" big leaps or just "incremental work"? Has the research become "more revolutionary" or "more incremental"? I don't know how such questions could be meaningfully answered. Perhaps, we could compare the research at two institutions or in two nations and say which of them is doing "more incremental" work and which of them is doing "more creative or revolutionary" work.

But how could we possibly quantify the "incremental status" of the research in the whole physics? We don't have anything to compare this quantity to. It is meaningless. You may find the research "too incremental" but this feeling says much more about you than it says about physics. And if you're not able to convert this desire (and it's just a desire) to valuable physics, you're just blabbering.

Can we compare two eras and say which of them was more creative or more incremental? I don't think so. Different eras are solving different questions. The existing knowledge and other initial conditions are different, too. Different questions combined with different circumstances require different strategies. Creativity may always be redefined by a multiplicative factor that depends on "which questions we are solving".

Quite generally, I think that the ideas that Albert Einstein was a "more creative" or "less conventional" physicist than some of the best physicists of the contemporary world to be just laymen's myths. They're not just myths – they're deliberately fabricated tools of propaganda whose ultimate agenda is to sling mud on modern physics.

Albert Einstein was a highly conservative physicist. He learned the true fundamentals of the 19th century physics extremely well and extremely carefully and his success mostly boiled down to the fact that he took the existing physics and its principles more seriously than everyone else. His conservative character (in physics) arguably became excessive after he completed GR and it may be interpreted as the reason why he failed to embrace quantum mechanics and do top research in the last 30 years of his life.

But Einstein never talked about himself as about a revolutionary. He was always interpreting relativity as some refinement of the existing insights – and indeed, it is a legitimate way to interpret his most famous theory. It's also untrue that he was an outsider – he was trained at one of the best universities in Europe. His paper on special relativity was quickly accepted for publication because the reviewer (Max Planck) could instantly understand its value and its validity. Many others would be able to do the same thing. Lorentz and Poincaré were pretty close to finding special relativity by themselves. Einstein was no warrior who would be standing against the whole scientific community for years. All these ideas are myths.

In fact, we could say that Einstein, a man who became a celebrity well during his lifetime, was the opposite of the folks who had to face the hostile group think of their environment. Perhaps, he wasn't so much ahead of his time. And when it comes to quantum mechanics, its pioneers were clearly at least 30 years ahead of him because he just couldn't "get" their great points until the end of his life.

On the other hand, it's equally untrue that the best researchers today fail to have the revolutionary X-factor or that they're just working within a straitjacket of group think. Numerous top string theorists are and have been genuine heroes of science. They're the ultimate solitaires, too. You have a few string theorists per 10 million people. If you spread string theorists uniformly over the globe, each of them would have to walk for hundreds of miles to find the nearest other string theorist.

They're not just rare. They're actively opposed by mobs, by millions of the stupid people. There exists a whole movement of worthless yet aggressive scumbags and assholes who try to sling mud at string theorists and often harm them personally. Some spoiled brats from Nazi families – yes, I mean the superannuated teaching assistant at Columbia University – have made a living of organizing this scum. The comparison to Galileo might be apt – maybe, Galileo faced a weaker backlash by the bigoted intellectual dwarfs than the string theorists do. Fortunately, most of them are hiding in ivory towers so they haven't yet noticed how much hostile scum there is outside these towers.

So the suggestion that the revolutionary character of the top researchers has decreased is just a piece of anti-science propaganda.

Sabine mentioned a paper in Science that revealed that the most influential papers combine scientific concepts in the most widespread ways. She uses this result to criticize the low level of creativity in science. Well, the percentage of papers that use unusual combination of concepts according to some precise measure is a very artificial quantity invented by the soft scientists and the purpose of science is certainly not to maximize this quantity. If this were the purpose, it would also be extremely easy to become the leader; just ask Uncle Al how he does it.

There is a good reason why highly unusual combinations of concepts aren't likely to result in influential papers. Most people who are trying to combine concepts in bizarre ways are just confused about basic science. They're Uncle Als who wouldn't pass a Turing test. They're random generators who confuse science and poetry.

Science is learning about new phenomena, new relationships, but it is also getting more certain about many questions that have been uncertain so far. Science isn't doing the "exact same thing" as it was doing 50 or 100 years ago. So if a soft scientist invents a quantity X, the percentage of papers combining concepts in unusual combinations, or something like that, there is absolutely no reason to expect that this quantity should be constant after 50 or 100 years.

Yet, social sciences and other pseudosciences are implicitly making such assumptions all the time. That's how they differ from hard sciences. They use unjustifiable feelings and arbitrary guesses as if they were on par with established scientific insights. Sabine Hossenfelder is buying this approach, too.

So the idea that something is wrong with science because the quantity X defined above was increasing or decreasing is just idiotic. Moreover, as I have already mentioned in a related context, when unusual combinations of concepts do occur, like the combination "entanglement" and "non-traversable wormhole", the people who love to praise the unusual combinations remain calm and uninterested even though the paper is clearly correct. Once again, in my eyes, this proves that they don't really care about papers capable of combining concepts in creative combinations. What they care about is to invent demagogic excuses to sling mud at science – or at least the genuine, unbounded part of science that doesn't agree with their preconceived quotas (and sometimes even preconceived results).

Sabine's comments are designed to sound "superficially sensible" but I smell a rat behind most of her sentences. For example, we hear:

But secondly, and more importantly, the mechanism of combining existing ideas is a necessary, but not a sufficient, creative process for sustainable progress in science.

Well, we've been surely used to hearing about a completely new concepts. Radioactivity. A new lepton. A new phenomenon, and so on. Quantum mechanics was arguably the "most novel" development in the history of physics. But it's not guaranteed that in fundamental physics, we will never run out of the new concepts. Indeed, the ultimate "finish line" is a possible final outcome. It's an outcome that many believe to ultimately materialize, it's an outcome that actually motivates many researchers.

(I have already mentioned in the context of the Amplituhedron that some connection to existing concepts – like the spacetime – is an advantage that makes a new concept or theory more important. By itself, the inability to directly link a new concept to spacetime physics is a disadvantage, not an advantage. If one creates a new concept, it is a liability, a debt, and this debt is only repaid when some previously unanswered known questions are answered or previously unknown connections between known concepts and phenomena are unmasked!)

Once all the building blocks are found, there may still be a period in which they are being combined in all the overlooked ways. And even this activity may slow down or stop. It doesn't depend exclusively on us and our skills, desires, and character; it depends on the way how Nature actually works. If a subdiscipline of science finds everything there is, it is a fact we must embrace. The purpose of science isn't to have a "sustainable progress" in each discipline (despite the popularity of the word "sustainable" among Marxists who currently call themselves "environmentalists"). The purpose of science is to find the truth about Nature. The truth may sometimes become complete, too. If that's so, some jobs may become redundant. But the purpose of science is not to preserve the jobs, either.

So the obsession with "sustainable progress" is as misplaced as the obsession with "creativity". These things are just emotional baggage that some people pour onto science and that they want to upgrade to the rulers of science. But these principles aren't leading principles of science. And they can't be leading principles of science as long as it is science.

To summarize, yes, I am annoyed by the constant exposure to people who are frustrated about science, who think and say that science is something else than what they would like science to be, who find it more creative, less creative, more automatic, less automatic, too fast, too slow, too aggressive, too conventional, who think that it combines concepts too chaotically or who think that the combinations are too restricted, and so on, and so on. I love science the way She is, I choose to enjoy (and focus on) the things that are true, that work, that are convincing, that have a deep wisdom and I feel sorry for those who don't enjoy science. But there's no way how I can help them – on the other hand, I think it is possible for them to shut their mouth and stop annoying people who are not handicapped in the same way as they are.

And that's the memo.

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!