Soccer team got a qualitative leap

AP reports on Lionel Messi, the Spanish soccer star from Argentina:

Even on a team full of World Cup winners and European champions, Messi stood out.

United manager Alex Ferguson calls Barcelona the best team he has come up against in almost four decades of coaching, and Barcelona’s Pep Guardiola says Messi is the key.

“We have good players in the team, but he makes the difference,” Guardiola said. “We can compete, but without him we would not have that qualitative leap that we do have with him.

“We have hard work, we have talent; we’ve used tactics and we’ve tried to put players at their ease. But Messi is unique, he is a one-off.”

Note that Messi is a "qualitative leap", and not a quantum leap. A quantum leap is a atomic electron transition, or more colloquially, and small discrete shift. Maybe the reporter noticed my argument that The quantum leap is a Marxist plot.

The term one-off is more popular in Britain, and is something that is singular or unique. It suggests that some assembly-line manufacturing process had to be interrupted to make a custom product.

Quantum cosmology

Sean M. Carroll writes:

When physicists are asked about “parallel worlds” or ideas along those lines, they have to be careful to distinguish among different interpretations of that idea. There is the “multiverse” of inflationary cosmology, the “many worlds” or “branches of the wave function” of quantum mechanics, and “parallel branes” of string theory. Increasingly, however, people are wondering whether the first two concepts might actually represent the same underlying idea. ...

There are two ideas that fit together to make this crazy-sounding proposal into something sensible. The first is quantum vacuum decay.

When particle physicists say “vacuum,” they don’t mean “empty space,” they mean “a state of a theory that has the lowest energy of all similar-looking states.” ...

Keep that in mind, and now let’s introduce the second key ingredient: horizon complementarity.
The idea of horizon complementarity is a generalization of the idea of black hole complementarity, which in turn is a play on the idea of quantum complementarity. (Confused yet?) Complementarity was introduced by Niels Bohr, as a way of basically saying “you can think of an electron as a particle, or as a wave, but not as both at the same time.” That is, there are different but equally valid ways of describing something, but ways that you can’t invoke simultaneously.

For black holes, complementarity was taken to roughly mean “you can talk about what’s going on inside the black hole, or outside, but not both at the same time.” It is a way of escaping the paradox of information loss as black holes evaporate.

This is nonsense. Woit comments here. Complementarity is just a buzzword to ignore the obvious contradictions.

Carroll wrote a 2005 essay on Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists. I expected arguments against the existence of God, or examples of how religious thinking has misled scientists in the past. Instead he gives this:

The basic scientific assumption is that there is exists a complete and coherent description of how the world works. ...
In particular, how do we go about deciding whether a theory is more or less likely to be consistent with a single coherent description of nature? It is at this point that the judgment of the individual scientist necessarily plays a crucial role; the process is irreducibly non-algorithmic.

He follows this with explanations for dark matter, and why one argument is preferred over another.

I don't see where Carroll makes any scientific arguments. He may turn out to be right about dark matter, but as a scientific question, we don't know.

Update: NewScientist adds to this nonsense with When the multiverse and many-worlds collide:

The problem is the observability of our universe. While most of us simply take it for granted that we should be able to observe our universe, it is a different story for cosmologists. When they apply quantum mechanics - which successfully describes the behaviour of very small objects like atoms - to the entire cosmos, the equations imply that it must exist in many different states simultaneously, a phenomenon called a superposition. Yet that is clearly not what we observe.

It has an accompanying editorial, God deserves a cosmological explanation, says that "cosmologists claim to have found a way to rid themselves of the need for a God-like observer." Peter Woit criticizes it here.

Defending Copenhagen

Lubos Motl writes:

There's a lot of misunderstandings being spread about the Copenhagen interpretation - and I would say that some of them should better be classified as deliberately propagated lies and propaganda. In this text, I would like to clarify some of them. ...

So all the points of the Copenhagen interpretation were right and ...

Well, I surely don't expect that people will stop being hysterically angry about the Copenhagen interpretation and its alleged flaws - which don't exist. But at least, I would like to see the chronic Copenhagen haters to acknowledge that the Copenhagen interpretation says what it says and that it clearly doesn't have any demonstrable flaws. It has no internal inconsistencies and it is not in contradiction to any observation done as of today.

Motl has some strange views, but he is mostly correctly on this. The Copenhagen interpretation is not the best, and it has fallen out of favor but it is extremely useful and there is nothing wrong with it.

Teutonic shift in the Middle East

USA Today reports:

This morning, the White House sent out a correction on what the president meant to say:
"Internationally, we've gone through a **Teutonic [tectonic] shift in the Middle East that could have enormous ramifications for years to come."

The M-W dictionary defines:

Definition of TECTONIC
1: of or relating to tectonics
2: having a strong and widespread impact "a tectonic shift in voting patterns"

At least Obama did not call it a Paradigm shift. His other recent gaffe was to sign a guestbook with a 2008 date.

Shape of the electron

NewScientist reports:

WHAT shape is an electron? The standard model of particle physics predicts that electrons are egg-shaped, but that the amount of distortion from a perfect sphere is so tiny that no existing experiment could possibly detect it. However, a rival theory called supersymmetry predicts that this egg-shaped distortion should be large enough to be detectable.

Here is the Nature abstract:

The electron is predicted to be slightly aspheric1, with a distortion characterized by the electric dipole moment (EDM), de. No experiment has ever detected this deviation. The standard model of particle physics predicts that de is far too small to detect2, being some eleven orders of magnitude smaller than the current experimental sensitivity. However, many extensions to the standard model naturally predict much larger values of de that should be detectable3. This makes the search for the electron EDM a powerful way to search for new physics and constrain the possible extensions.

The shape of the electron played a crucial role in the discovery of relativity. Lorentz's relativity theory was called "electron theory". He got the Nobel prize for it in 1902, but by 1905 many younger physicists were following Max Abraham's theory for various theoretical and experimental reasons. Poincare's 1905 paper explained the superiority of relativity theory in terms of the stresses that maintain the shape of the electron. Those stresses are now called Poincare stresses or pressure. The electric charges within the electron would normal repel each other, and you can imagine some sort of pressure from the aether holding the charges together.

Einstein also wrote a 1905 paper on Lorentz's relativity, but it is not clear that he understood how it compared to the alternatives. He seemed to mainly just trust that Lorentz and Poincare had gotten it right, and regurgitated what they said.

The shape of the electron is still a bit of a mystery. If this experiment can be done more accurately, maybe it can help eliminate supersymmetry and other silly theories.

Reputation enhanced by blunder

NewScientist magazine has some articles this week on what science gets it wrong, and writes
Rewriting the textbooks: Einstein's cosmological fudge:

Albert Einstein's towering reputation is only enhanced by his self-styled biggest blunder. It might not have been a blunder after all.

At stake is the fate of the universe. In 1915, Einstein derived the equations of general relativity that describe the workings of a gravity-dominated cosmos. He added a fudge factor called the cosmological constant to ensure that, in keeping with contemporary tastes, the universe described neither expanded nor contracted. Soon after, though, Edwin Hubble showed that distant galaxies were receding from us, blowing the static universe apart. Einstein reputedly disowned his idea.

He might now want to disown the disowning. The discovery in 1998 that very distant supernovae appear to be not just receding but accelerating away from us suggests the presence of a mysterious "dark energy" that counteracts gravity's pull (The Astronomical Journal, vol 116, p 1009). And it turns out that a good way to reproduce this effect is to add the fudge back into Einstein's cosmological recipe.

Einstein did not derive those equations, he got them from Grossmann and Hilbert. The expansion of the universe was shown by LeMaitre before Hubble, and explained here and here. Einstein attacked LeMaitre for being wrong, and did not accept the expansion until years later.

Add the fudge back in? Einstein was as wrong as he could be. It is funny how his reputation can be enhanced by blunders.

Einstein lied about botox

Celebrity news site TMZ reports:

The reporter behind the Botox Mom story claims Sheena Upton aka Kerry Campbell FRAMED her in a diabolical plot to profit off her 8-year-old daughter -- and now, the reporter says Sheena ruined her life.

The reporter Alley Einstein -- who set up the original deal with the British tabloid The Sun -- signed a sworn declaration, obtained by TMZ, in which she claims the emails TMZ posted this morning were "doctored" to make it look like Einstein coached Upton and told her to lie.

Einstein claims the emails detailing the Botox story -- including quotations -- were intended to be used as a "media briefing sheet" to help Upton REMEMBER several key points ... it was NOT a script.

Einstein claims her reputation is now ruined -- insisting she's been "emotionally and professionally scarred" by the entire situation ... in fact, Einstein claims she even had to seek out medical attention.

As for the $1,000 Einstein wired Upton -- Einstein claims Upton demanded the money for "vital bills" ... but then splurged on a shopping spree instead.

Best part -- back when she was working the story, Einstein claims she asked Upton if she was "prepared to be the most hated woman in America" ... and Upton replied, "Hell yes, bring it on."

Einstein was in the business of buying shady news stories for tabloids. The kid tested negative for botox. She sure got a sensationalist bogus story this time.

As far as I know, this Einstein with the ruined reputation is not related to the Einstein who ruined physics.