In Our Time: Symmetry, Moonshine, String Theory and E8

It's good to stretch one's mind on the way in to the office. It makes modeling relationships between arcane procedural descriptions and CPT codes seem pleasantly relaxing.

Today's stretch is courtesy of an In Our Time podcast [1] on symmetry. The professors do discuss Galois, but so far they've missed Emily Noether. Excellent anyway.

I'm not quite done, but I've learned about Galois, a bit of history, and, for the first time, I have a vague understanding of what Group Theory is about and it's relationship to geometry and topology. Not bad for free.

Towards the end of the podcast they talk about mysterious relationships between one "monstrous" element in an "atlas" of "Groups", where a Group is a collection of mathematical objects with shared symmetric transformations. One of them, the "monster", is described as having a mysterious relationship with mathematical physics.

Cue Wikipedia:

Monstrous moonshine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Specifically, Conway and Norton, following an initial observation by John McKay, found that the Fourier expansion of j(τ) ... could be expressed in terms of linear combinations of the dimensions of the irreducible representations of M ...

... lying behind monstrous moonshine is a certain string theory having the Monster group as symmetries; the conjectures made by Conway and Norton were proven by Richard Ewen Borcherds in 1992 using the no-ghost theorem from string theory and the theory of vertex operator algebras and generalized Kac-Moody superalgebras.

... Igor Frenkel, James Lepowsky and Arne Meurman explicitly constructed this representation using vertex operators in conformal field theory describing bosonic string theory compactified on a 24-dimensional torus generated by the Leech lattice and orbifolded by a reflection. The resulting module is called the Monster module...

Well, ok, so I didn't exactly follow all of that. Impressive at a cocktail party no doubt, but we don't do that sort of thing.

All quite exciting in a geeky sort of way, except bosonic string theory seems to have been a bit of a dead end. Again, from Wikipedia (emphases mine, I thought this was a lovely explanation btw_:

Bosonic String theory is the original version of string theory, developed in the late 1960s. Although it has many attractive features, it has a pair of features that render it unattractive as a physical model. Firstly it predicts only the existence of bosons whereas we know many physical particles are fermions. Secondly, it predicts the existence of a particle whose mass is imaginary implying that it travels faster than light. The existence of such a particle, commonly known as a tachyon, would conflict with much of what we know about physics, and such particles have never been observed.

Another feature of bosonic string theory is that in general the theory displays inconsistencies due to the conformal anomaly. In a spacetime of 26 dimensions, however, with 25 dimensions of space and one of time, the inconsistencies cancel. Another way to look at this is that in general bosonic string theory predicts unphysical particle states called 'ghosts'. In 26 dimensions the no-ghost theorem predicts that these ghost states have no interaction whatsoever with any other states and hence that they can be ignored leaving a consistent theory. So bosonic string theory predicts a 26 dimensional spacetime. This high dimensionality isn't a problem for bosonic string theory because it can be formulated in such a way that along the 22 excess dimensions, spacetime is folded up to form a small torus. This would leave only the familiar four dimensions of spacetime visible.

In the early 1970s, supersymmetry was discovered in the context of string theory, and a new version of string theory called superstring theory (supersymmetric string theory) became the real focus. Nevertheless, bosonic string theory remains a very useful "toy model" to understand many general features of perturbative string theory, and string theory textbooks usually start with the bosonic string...

So why does Time always get only one dimension? Space seems awfully greedy.

So the monster/physics connection didn't quite hold up, but one supposes Supersymmetry might have some familial connection to the Monster.

Or perhaps there's another step up?

... E8 is the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional. E8 itself is 248-dimensional...

...Hermann Nicolai, Director of the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany. "While mathematicians have known for a long time about the beauty and the uniqueness of E8, we physicists have come to appreciate its exceptional role only more recently - yet, in our attempts to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces into a consistent theory of quantum gravity, we now encounter it at almost every corner."

Or a step down?

... Since 1997, physicists have proposed countless variations on Maldacena's theme, all of which interpret a string as a swarm of particles living in a small number of dimensions. Perhaps the easiest case to visualize is when that number is two. In such a scenario, anything that takes place in your many-dimensional, stringy universe has a sort of shadow representation in terms of particles moving on that universe's 'sphere at infinity.' This esoteric-sounding concept is actually similar to the familiar celestial sphere of the night sky as seen from Earth: It's the two-dimensional surface spanning all possible directions one can point to infinitely far in space..

I probably need to stop now. Work beckons, and my furhter inquires on relationship between E8 and the Monster Group started running into "alternative physics" posts. I have enough trouble with "conventional" physics, thanks.

Ok, one last comment. In the nice, sane, quiet world of the humble Higgs (God) particle CV tells us:

... if you impose upon our relativistic, complex, quantum-mechanical wavefunctions the requirement that they be invariant under these U(1) transformations, then you get electromagnetism. Conservation of electric charge. A massless photon. QED - quantum electrodynamics, in all its 12-digit precision glory. Electromagnetism is a simple consequence of the U(1) symmetry of any wavefunction....

It's all relative (sorry). QED seems perfectly pedestrian now.

[1] From a prior post:

Melvyn Bragg's BBC show, In Our Time, has begun a new season. I'm a fan.

The bad news is that the BBC is sticking with its execrable latest-episode-only download policy. So if you want to listen to the superb Opium War episode on your MP3 player you need to either use Audio Hijack Pro to capture the RealAudio stream or (if you know me) ask me for a DVD with the entire series [1]. Incidentally, this is a good time to write a quick email to set IOT free.

The good news is there's a new page that makes it easy to subscribe to a feed. I used to subscribe via iTunes, but if I went a week without using iTunes I missed the show. Now I subscribe via iTunes and Bloglines; I use Bloglines at least daily so it's easy for me to save the MP3 and email it to myself.

The Economist's print edition has a full Feed

So how are they going to make money?

There's now a full feed for The Economist print edition. It's somewhat useful for reading (esp. on the Kindle methinks), but it doesn't provide any orientation cues. So no "Africa", "Lexington", etc. It does let you know a new version has been released and it's easy to click to the web view.

I ended my Economist subscription about two years ago when the quality went down the tubes. It's still pretty crummy, but this feed will get me scanning the articles at least. Their science and Africa coverage is still quite good.

In January the WSJ is supposed to go free as well.

I will need to boost my scanning speed.

HealthcareITJobs - from Mr HISTalk

This is a bit different from my usual posts.

I work in healthcare IT. I've done it for over 10 years, mostly in a large corporation. The last bit is mind boggling.

Anyway, in our industry we read HISTtalk, the anonymous blog of a healthcare CIO. At its best it's a rich source of industry gossip, though in recent months it's been a bit dull. The contradictions of writing interesting things about companies that are also sponsors may be taking its toll.

Today's issue tells Mr. HISTalk is getting behind a job board focusing on Healthcare IT, named, remarkably, HealthcareITJobs. If you're interested in this industry it is likely worth a look.

BTW, the best Healthcare CIO blog belongs to Harvard's John Halamka's, aka the "geekdoctor". It's amazing, I write about it on our corporate blogs pretty regularly.

How Venus got its CO2 atmosphere

Praise goes to Kenneth Chang, for writing the first article on recent Venus discoveries that makes any sense.

We know why Venus is hot -- it's the CO2 atmosphere. The new discoveries are about how Venus went from an atmosphere like ours to a very dense atmosphere that's almost all CO2 ...

New Findings Underscore an Earth-Venus Kinship - New York Times:

... Subsequent visits by spacecraft confirmed that the surface temperatures exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt tin and lead...

... Scientists imagine that Venus formed with much liquid water, just like Earth, but that because it is closer to the Sun, with sunlight twice as intense as on Earth, the water began to evaporate. Water vapor, also a greenhouse gas, trapped heat.

“That heats up the surface and leads to more evaporation,” said David Grinspoon of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. “It’s a powerful feedback.”

The evaporation accelerated until all the liquid water had turned into a thick atmosphere of water vapor. As the water molecules floated in the air, scientists hypothesize, ultraviolet rays from the Sun broke them apart into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Chemical reactions with minerals in the rocks transformed the oxygen into carbon dioxide. The hydrogen, the lightest of atoms, escaped into outer space...

So the oceans of Venus, and a chunk of its surfce, turned into an ultra-dense atmosphere of CO2. That's a satisfying story. It will likely help us understand what the habitable zone of star is.

Anyone have a few bazillion tons of hydrogen lying about?

Selfishness and its justifications

I'm echoing DeLong here, save I think the thesis is at least as true of America libertarians as of American conservatives.

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else:

...As I've posted earlier, the single most sensible thing said in political philosophy in the twentieth century was JK Galbraith's aphorism that the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been 'the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness'.

Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is 'what I have, I keep'.

Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that 'what I have, I keep' is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things.

Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven't yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem...

Neo-calvinism is the American fusion of 'selfishness as virtue' with 'wealth as a sign of God's blessings'.

China's hundred billion reasons to dislike the US

Maybe this is why China blocked US ships from entering Hong Kong ...

Dyer- The US Dollar: The Long Farewell

...China, which was sitting on about a trillion US dollars, simply lost several hundred billion as the currency's value fell....

So, does this mean China has just paid a large chunk of the costs of America's adventures in Iraq?

That might engender a certain amount of unhappiness.

Yes, Google does know where I am

Today I searched on "arrowhead resort".

After about 2-3 hits Google inserted something new. A geographically constrained suggestion:

arrowhead resort - Google Search: "See results for: arrowhead resort minnesota"

Ahh. Yes, I'd read Google was going to be adding location to their search results, using both traditional IP location and more exotic methods.

It's a bit spooky, but good.

Privacy? I fought that battle in the early 90s. Nobody was interested. It's much too late now.

History of the First Peoples - Charles Mann's 1491

Charles Mann wrote a 2002 article in the Atlantic about the human history of the Americas prior to the European invasion. This article became a 2004 NYT essay and then a well regarded 2006 book.

Most recently this letter to Brad DeLong, published on Brad's blog, is a great advert for the book (emphases mine) ...

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

... Pennington correctly observes that I "barely mentioned the horrible [e]ffects of the wars that went on between the whites and indians." This is because I was writing about demography and demographically they didn't amount to much. By the 18th century, disease had already wiped out 75-95% of the native population of the Americas. Indian warfare, awful as it often was, simply piled on another few percentage points to the mortality count.

... As the historian Alfred Crosby has repeatedly observed, societies tend to measure "progress" in terms of things that they are good at. Europeans were good at making metal tools and devices, so we tend to look for them -- Indians didn't have steel axes and geared machines, so they must be inferior. But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves. It's hard to say which view is correct.

...many European innovations were directly related to the existence of domestic animals. At the time of its construction, the Roman highway system had no direct equivalent in the Americas. Paved roads are obviously a sign of technological development, because you need them for large-scale transportation, right? But it would have been nuts for Indians to have built such roads, because they didn't have wheeled vehicles. And they didn't have wheeled vehicles (except as toys) because they didn't have horses, and they evidently calculated that the small gains in efficiency for human-powered vehicles was not worth the large costs in labor and materials to build highways, especially when rivers were an attractive alternative. (Compared to Europe, much of the Americas is river-rich.) So does this mean that Native America was less developed?

Lauren Tombari asks, "Wouldn´t there be some evidence of the many towns Desoto saw? Would there be ~100 million graves from the 95% death rate?" She will be happy to learn there is lots of evidence of the many towns seen by DeSoto. Although it is inexplicably absent from US history textbooks, there were literally thousands of mound cities and towns in the US Southeast and the Mississippi valley. Many have been destroyed, but my book, 1491, has a map of some of the main sites that remain. About the graves: the answer is no. In epidemics, people generally aren't buried, but left to die where they fall. The vast majority of those skeletons simply vanish. An example of this is the slaughter of the buffalo. We know from abundant historical records that less than 150 years ago hunters killed millions of bison in the Great Plains. Yet if you drive around there now, you don't see heaps of bones. The same, alas, happened to Indians. Of course it didn't happen to every Indian -- and there are many, many known Indian graveyards, so many that the federal government has passed special legislation to protect them.

... In this country, the French, Spanish, Dutch and English made more than 20 attempts to found colonies before the Pilgrims. All but one of them failed. The exception was Jamestown, in which almost 5 out of 6 colonists sent in the first 15 years died -- something that most people would regard as a failure. (St. Augustine, in Florida, was founded before Plimoth, but it was abandoned for years before being resettled, so I would count it as a failure, too.) Then comes the epidemic in New England, and suddenly, beginning with the Pilgrims, almost every English colony survives and thrives.

The thesis, in short, is that the pre-euro population of the Americas was tens of millions of people, perhaps 100 million. A larger population than the Europe of that time.

A possible counter-argument would be to ask why then did Amerindians not have their equivalent of the Euro's embedded bio-weapons? A population of that size should be able to support some very nasty viruses.

The Atlantic article argues that humans disseminated throughout the Americans long before 12,000 BCE, however I think recent gene data supports the 12,000 BCE date for all living descendants of the first people. Animal extinction and canine genomic data may also support the 12,000 BCE date. If 12,000 BCE is in fact the date for entrance to the Americas, that might also argue against such a vast population.

See also: Squanto's story, European rat plagues kill American rats, Mann's 2004 NYT essay, European dog diseases kill American dogs.

Regardless of the original population the euro "conquest" (inheritance, almost) of the Americas is an abject lesson in the awesome power of biological WMDs.

Romney and Mormon theology

Four years ago I wrote about John Krakauer's book on Mormon fundamentalism. I've also visited the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City -- something no tourist should miss.

Between those two primary sources, and a few other readings, I came away thinking that Mormonism is no odder than any other religion, but that it suffers the great disadvantage of being born in the modern world. The Mormon church has only become socially respectable within the past 30 years (really end polygamy, deemphasize the sin of being pigmented), and we know, unfortunately, far more about Smith than Buddha or Christ.

Here's how the Enclyclopedia Brittanica describes Mormon theology:

...The Book of Mormon recounts the history of a family of Israelites that migrated to America centuries before Jesus Christ and were taught by prophets similar to those in the Old Testament. The religion Smith founded originated amid the great fervour of competing Christian revivalist movements in early 19th-century America but departed from them in its proclamation of a new dispensation. Through Smith, God had restored the “true church”—i.e., the primitive Christian church—and had reasserted the true faith from which the various Christian churches had strayed..

The Britannica article omits some interesting details. Mormons believe the ancient peoples of America fought a cataclysmic "high tech" (compared to pre-civil war America) battle. The story is no more bizarre than "Noah's Ark", but it's a different story than Christians are accustomed to hearing.

This is why I've been amazed that Romney has been able to run for president within the GOP. Socially and culturally he has a lot in common with Christian fundamentalists, but so do Islamic fundamentalists. Mormonism is no closer to Christianity than is Islam. How does this
ever play within the GOP?

This must annoy people like Christopher Hitchens who struggles in Slate to find a secular justification for asking Romney about the Mormon church ...

Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about his Mormon faith. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

...It ought to be borne in mind that Romney is not a mere rank-and-file Mormon. His family is, and has been for generations, part of the dynastic leadership of the mad cult invented by the convicted fraud Joseph Smith. It is not just legitimate that he be asked about the beliefs that he has not just held, but has caused to be spread and caused to be inculcated into children. It is essential. Here is the most salient reason: Until 1978, the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was an officially racist organization. Mitt Romney was an adult in 1978. We need to know how he justified this to himself, and we need to hear his self-criticism, if he should chance to have one...

Hmph. The argument feels week.

It would be interesting to know whether Romney is a racist or not, but we should be able to find that out from the Boston media who knew him as governor of Massachusetts. Otherwise Romney's religion and theology are mostly curiosities for secular humanists, agnostics, and atheists.

For Christian, particularly fundamentalists and evangelicals, the questions are far more important. I'm a bit surprised, but mostly amused, that nobody asks on their behalf.

The cinema beneath the Seine

Today we all feel proud of the French.

Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited:

...Klausmann and his crew are connaisseurs of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since....

Emily thinks they've been reading Neil Gaiman.

So is the spelling "connaisseurs" a clever word play?

The American cellular empire has fallen, let the wars begin

This is what Europeans have had forever:

Verizon Wireless Says ‘Bring Your Own’ Device - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog:

... Verizon Wireless has stunned the wireless world by announcing that by sometime next year it will open its network to “any apps, any device.” There is a lot of fine print, but the essence appears to be that Verizon will offer two flavors of service: its traditional bundle, which typically includes a subsidy for phone purchase and various other features, and “bring your own” device service, which will be open to any device that meets “minimum technical standards.”...

The excellent NYT blog post connects this move to the big bandwidth brawl (BBB) over the 700 MHz US spectrum. On a related front T-Mobile announced a month or so ago that their future phones will support VOIP over Wifi.

The American cell phone empire as we've known it has fallen. It was a rotten tree of an empire, it only took one shove from Apple to bring it down.

Now we will see the mother of all bloodless battles. May the struggle be glorious and long.

Nanotechnology made real: inner life of a cell

This one came via a DeLong link. Here you can see the dreams of nanotechnology made real - 20 years ahead of time:

Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell | Studio Daily:

... The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students... Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli....

Everyone needs to watch this. I could make up a story for most of it, but I'd like to hear a technical commentary. DeLong's post apparently had that, but it's missing in action at the moment.

Housing: oh poop

This would be mildly worrying if it weren't written by Larry Summers.

FT.com / Columnists / Lawrence Summers - Wake up to the dangers of a deepening crisis:

....Several streams of data indicate how much more serious the situation is than was clear a few months ago. First, forward-looking indicators suggest that the housing sector may be in free-fall from what felt like the basement levels of a few months ago. Single family home construction may be down over the next year by as much as half from previous peak levels. There are forecasts implied by at least one property derivatives market indicating that nationwide house prices could fall from their previous peaks by as much as 25 per cent over the next several years.

We do not have comparable experiences on which to base predictions about what this will mean for the overall economy, but it is hard to believe declines of anything like this magnitude will not lead to a dramatic slowing in the consumer spending that has driven the economy in recent years.

Second, it is now clear that only a small part of the financial distress that must be worked through has yet been faced. On even the most optimistic estimates, the rate of foreclosure will more than double over the next year as rates reset on subprime mortgages and home values fall. Estimates vary, but there is nearly universal agreement that – if all assets were marked to market valuations – total losses in the American...

Since it is written by Summers it's a cut above mildly worrying.

The dysfunctional print media

I don't read TIME magazine. Good thing, given this story of TIME's fictional coverage of some recent federal legislation ...:

Glenn Greenwald - Political Blogs and Opinions - Salon

... Klein, of course, never bothered to read the bill and still hasn't (even though he is published by Time to "report on" and opine about this bill). Instead, even now, he says that he has spoken with both Republicans and Democrats, and while Democrats insist that what he wrote was false, "the Republican Committee staff disagrees and says [his] reporting is correct."

In other words, Klein's GOP source(s) blatantly lied to him about what the bill does and doesn't do in order to manipulate him into uncritically feeding Time's readers the Rush Limbaugh Line -- namely, that Democrats are giving equal rights to Terrorists and preventing the Leader from eavesdropping on foreign Terrorists. And Klein dutifully wrote down what he was told in Time without bothering to find out if it was true and without ever bothering to talk to any of the bill's Democratic proponents. And no Time Editor knew enough or cared enough to bother correcting any of it. And thus, the unfortunate 4 million Americans who read and trust Time now think that the Democrats' FISA bill does the exact opposite of what it actually does.

That is the real story here. That's how our political system works. Scheming GOP operatives feed whispered lies to their favorite, most gullible, most slothful and/or dishonest Beltway journalists...

These stories do make me feel a bit better about the implosion of the print media. There's a lot of rot in that old world.

Unfortunately I suspect TIME is only giving its readers what they want to hear (and the truth is irrelevant). So things won't improve until the audience is upgraded.

The real threat to Microsoft and Apple

I'm not much of a salesman -- except on the rare occasion that I'm selling something I really believe in.

Twice I've made the big sale. One of those times was when I sold a rural school group on moving from the computer lab model to the computer library model -- @ 1992. Using the ultra-portable no hard-drive Apple Newton laptop.

Mercifully the school group came to their senses the next day and the plan died. A few months later the Newton laptop died too. Few now recall its brief existence.

Fifteen years later that original plan is becoming feasible ...

Charlie's Diary: Commoditizing our future

...Well, the OLPC XO-1 is now out, costs $188 in bulk (a chunk of which is attributable to the dollar collapsing in the meantime), and hasn't exactly taken the world by storm — but succeeded in sticking the proverbial cattle prod up Microsoft and Intel's collective arse. For too long, the software and CPU giants had been treating the PC market as a cash cow, with a natural floor on the price of the product; the XO-1 proved that they were overcharging grossly. Intel's reaction was the Classmate reference design, their own purported rival to the XO-1; the Asus Eee is what you get when a large far eastern OEM thinks 'hang on, can we commoditize this and sell it in bulk?' Microsoft, incidentally, failed to make it onto the Eee bandwagon because they wanted $40 for a Windows XP license — on a machine that starts at $250 for the stripped-down version. Mine runs Linux perfectly well, thank you, and comes with the basic stuff you need to be productive; OpenOffice, Thunderbird for email, Firefox as a web browser, and some other gadgets (like Skype and a webcam).

My first calculator cost about $180 in the early 1970s, required a plug, used wires to form numbers, and was bigger than my MacBook. Within 10 years similar machines were being distributed in cereal boxes.

That was commoditization.

I thought the same thing would happen to the Palm, that within 10 years we'd have similar things in our cereal boxes. After all, there were no moving parts.

That didn't happen, because Palm controlled the software and because the market for personal organizers turned out to be much smaller than I'd imagined.

I think Stross is right that we're again on the cusp of true calculator-style commoditization. The trick has been open source software, ruthless competition on the hardware side, the plummeting price of solid state storage and the development of low power designs that can run off commodity batteries (and outlets).

The DRM marketplace will keep proprietary system vendors alive for a while -- only they will be able to partner with media owners. How long, however, can the DRM market resist such a tide of low cost non-DRM compatible hardware?

On the other front, Google's Android reference mobile phone design has its natural home on millions of 2012 cell phones distributed throughout Africa.

Samsara happens.

This is a bad time for both Microsoft and (to a lesser extent) Apple to be demonstrating severe quality and reliability problems. Quality and cost-of-ownership are the most obvious ways Apple can slow the tide long enough to find a way to surf along (Android uses Apple's WebKit for example). If Apple and Microsoft continue to cede that advantage, they'll be obliterated.

Hmm. Microsoft cratering. The US dollar in free fall. Peak oil showing up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. A $400 billion mortgage market collapse. Should be an interesting decade.