Lubos Motl

Predicted by Luboš: https://motls.blogspot.com/2020/05/may-11th-12th-could-be-great-days-t…

There is more to it - the number -1/12 actually pops up in physics when doing something awfully similar to 1+2+3... This may be useful: https://motls.blogspot.ca/2014/01/sum-of-integers-and-oversold-common.… " The real problem is that the definition of the sum involving the limit of partial sums – limits that way too often "diverge" or "refuse to exist" – isn't the only definition or the best definition or the most natural definition that may be connected to the sum. There exist better definitions of the infinite sum – numerous definitions that turn out to be more natural in physics applications – and they generally produce the result −1/12−1/12. It is no trick or sleight-of-hand. The value −1/12−1/12 is really the right one and the rightness may be experimentally verified (using the Casimir effect). "

I can personally attest to the truth of Scott's characterization of Lubos Motl's personality. Lubos once publicly called me a "category 5 loon" [1] for something I said in a presentation on quantum mechanics [2]. What he didn't seem to realize was that the thing he was attacking me for was presented as a straw man. There's a lengthy introduction where I said, "The thing I am about to tell you is clearly false, but it seems to follow logically from the things they tell you in quantum mechanics 101. The trick is to figure out where the flaw in the reasoning lies." (And BTW, I can still fool card-carrying physicists with this puzzle even today.) AFAIK Lubos has never apologized (not that I ever really gave a lot of weight to his opinion). [1] https://motls.blogspot.com/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-again.htm… [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc

I certainly learnt a couple things about general relativity from that article (e.g. the "modern view" (meaning largely, the view from string theory) that "we understand Einstein's equations just as the equations of an "effective field theory""), although it was way over my head. That blog (Luboš Motl's) has an amazingly large number of long and technical or topical articles on physics. I found this one on Boltzmann and thermodynamics especially insightful and relatively non-technical: http://motls.blogspot.co.nz/2013/02/ludwig-boltzmann-birthday.html?m=1

Theoretical/mathematical physics: Not Even Wrong http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ The reference frame http://motls.blogspot.com/ (not only physics, but also climate change) Collective blog on mathematics and mathematical physics: n-Category cafe http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ The pace of progress in quantum computing is slooow, so Scott may not have much to say for a while. http://motls.blogspot.com/ Good physics (sometimes very technical, sometimes not), if you don't let Lubos' politics bother you.

These are most of those I follow... as you'll see, it's very difficult to find good material on maths and physics blogs, or at least I've had difficulties on finding it. Maths: http://www.arsmathematica.net/ http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ (not exactly maths but...) http://plus.maths.org/blog/ http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/ http://blog.plover.com/ (sometimes) http://blog.wolfram.com/ http://gowers.wordpress.com/ Physics: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress (very biased) http://angryphysicist.wordpress.com/ http://scottaaronson.com/blog http://motls.blogspot.com/ (very biased)

Yes, it is a false dichotomy, but the point is that it is one that follows directly from your argument: all your 'just like' comparisons apply as well to human biology as they do to the study of the mind, and if a thing studying itself is hopelessly compromised by subjectivity, then, by your argument, this must be so for human biology. History is another example of human self-study that is not rendered impossible by subjectivity. In this case, there is a term, 'whig history', for one form in which the investigator's bias is applied to his analysis of past events. The fact that this term exists, and that the phenomenon it labels can be identified and corrected for, shows that it is possible to work around the subjectivity of self-study. As for quantum mechanics, it seems there is indeed a good deal of subjectivity, at least in the Copenhagen interpretation. By your argument, that should have destroyed physics as an objective science, yet physics has been extraordinarily fruitful since the discovery of QM. Here is an example of Luboš Motl dealing, in his characteristic style, with subjectivity, and, in fact, discussing the topic "Why subjective quantum mechanics allows objective science." https://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-subjective-quantum-mechanics-al… It is somewhat ironic that all your arguments for the impossibility of understanding the mind, on account of a lack of objectivity, are themselves subjective. You are, of course, free to hold the opinion that…

This blog mentions some poll that was apparently made among google employees. But link to picture is broken :/ http://motls.blogspot.si/2017/08/james-damore-deserves-1-million-in.ht… > As Damore reminded us, most of the people who agree with him only dare to agree privately. > What do they answer when their opinions are measured through a poll run on Google-plus – which the SJW officials in charge could still hypothetically access? Some other Google employees gave us the following pie chart: > 14% strongly agree, 22% almost agree with Damore's letter. That's some 36% if you combine it – over 20,000 employees of Google. If you add the 13% of neutral folks, you will get almost 49%, a slightly greater percentage than 48.5% of those who almost disagree or strongly disagree. Clearly, even if the participants of the poll face some risks that their vote could be used against them, the supporters of Damore's view are at least comparable in size to the opponents.

I agree with the grandparent post, because I think it's misleading to lump all of mathematics together. I'm very bad at mental calculations and basic arithmetic, and I couldn't memorize integration formulas if my life depended on it, so I've never had very high grades in math, at least until I hit university. Yet I have a relatively easy time picking up the theory behind SAT solvers, Fourier transforms, or solving complex integrals. I think some people are better at concrete things like geometry or arithmetic, some people are better at logic, some people are good with operators and algebra... but one does not imply the others, and engineers may have an above-average capability for abstraction or logic that does not translate to much higher results in a high-school level exam. The study here is said to have studied people "from grade school to college and beyond", so I suspect the "math ability" they tested really has little to do with the math ability required for science and engineering. Here's another (slightly caustic) blog post which appears to be about the same study: http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/07/janet-hyde-boys-girls-in-math-not.ht… It is enough to read a brief review in Science to see that the headlines don't follow from the paper at all. The review explains the main reason of the results: they have detected no signal because the tests were too simple. They didn't really test "g" or the ability to think mathematically but rather attainment.

And linked from that, Lubos Motl's even less charitable take: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/bousso-et-al-catastrophe-imminent-ti… Much like most other doomsday prophets and other kinds of crackpots, the authors are completely unable to understand the point and the arguments that they're assuming something fundamentally wrong in their very first axioms - and that's why everything they write down has to end up being a complete nonsense. Instead, they obviously expect a long sequence of follow-up papers that will discuss whether the Universe will cease to exist in 5.31 or 5.32 billion years and worship the amazing prophets, Bousso et al., who have predicted this amazing doomsday. This is also clear from a staged dialogue included in the paper where a semi-dumb person asks various questions about the doomsday that the authors would clearly like to be discussed in other people's papers.

A spurious signal at LHC (that disappeared in later runs) that spurred a cottage industry of arXiv submissions trying to explain it. Authors, mostly grad students, quickly submitted hundreds of low quality articles trying to get in on the "discovery". Later articles would cite over 400 previous articles and it became one giant circle jerk. There were even blog posts complaining about the blatant "ambulance chasing". https://motls.blogspot.com/2016/06/ambulance-chasing-is-justifiable.ht… http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-gev-editio…

Interesting counterpoint from Lubos Motl https://motls.blogspot.com/2011/08/once-more-gravity-is-not-entropic-f…

From the post 5 years ago, this blog post summarizes the article well: https://motls.blogspot.com/2015/06/is-quantum-reality-personal.html Edit: Going through recent posts of this guy, I would also like to state that anything non physics related on his blog is crazy right-wing babble.

If you can stand his idiosyncrasies, Lubos Motls offers many direct counter points to Sabine: https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/03/some-reasons-why-west-wont-stop.htm… https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/11/new-veins-of-science-cant-be-found-…

Lubos Motls is a theoretical physicist and is probably classified as a denier. Though, I think this definition is applied too liberally. In his latest blog post he claims there is 1-2 deg of warming per century and this from contributions by mankind (he doesn’t break down the proportion). He doesn’t think the warming will be an issue for 200 years. https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/12/rss-amsu-acceleration-of-global-war…

The Reference Frame also discussed this[1] and showed why the paper is wrong. [1] https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/04/frauchiger-renner-trivial-to-see-th…

Yeah, this could be survivorship bias: https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/03/selection-of-climate-model-survivor… As someone who's written basic fluid dynamics codes, I'm blown away by the complexity of climate models. The errors I ran into in debugging my relatively straightforward codes were incredibly subtle. Like pressures, velocities still "looking right" but still being wrong, due to numerical viscosity and other artifacts of the inexact solutions to Navier-Stokes. This is for flow in a box in a steady state. For an entire planetary atmosphere at a time scale of decades, I can't even imagine how they can track down every error without duct taping "corrections" (overfitting) on everything.

Until it's replicated authoritatively, no they haven't. An in depth discussion from last time at The Reference Frame (guest blogger for those who don't like Lubos himself): https://motls.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-delirium-over-beryllium.html?m=…

"The real question is whether the discovery is important or interesting. And whether it is surprising. [...] OK, why does Wolchover claim that it is interesting or surprising? Because they gave that formula to Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner, for him to say something and he didn't know the formula and even expressed doubts. [...] So that's how it works. If you want to promote a new chocolate candybar, send a formula – or the nutritional values from the package – to someone like Terence Tao, to a darling of the media. The popular science writers will do the rest." https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/11/hype-about-formula-for-eigenstates.…

"they seem to assume that all the photons' degrees of freedom are described by pure states according to both observers. This seems wrong to me. The observation of the photons by Wigner's friend creates an entanglement with the degrees of freedom in the friend's body, so the state of the photons themselves become mixed according to Wigner (I mean the external observer), not pure. So I think that when these things are done correctly, it's not possible to find this kind of a "contradiction" in practice." https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/03/six-photons-claimed-to-prove-that.h…

Found an interesting technical summary/critique of these ideas https://motls.blogspot.com/2005/03/chapline-black-holes-dont-exist.htm…

See also https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23632-how-to-test-weinsteins-pr… and https://motls.blogspot.de/2017/11/weinsteins-view-on-quanta-geometry-i…

An opinionated post about another quantum radar: Chinese "quantum radar" is a thing that cannot exist https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/03/chinese-quantum-radar-is-thing-that…

Presumably the extra credit is that the binary Golay code is closely related to the Leech Lattice, and thus to the entire moonshine situation, which gets you to string theory. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_lattice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/03/umbral-moonshine-and-golay-code.html

http://motls.blogspot.ru/2011/08/once-more-gravity-is-not-entropic-for… Apparently Verlinde's theory predicts neutron decoherence in the Earth's gravitational field, contradicting well established experimental results.

I encourage you to not stop reading after he called you a loon. He dedicates a few paragraphs to explain what he feels is wrong with your talk. Also read the comments, where he says: I am watching the talk (final minutes now) and except for the history, meaning of interpretations etc., he actually understands QM more correctly than many people employed as physicists... (The audacity! Someone that actually watches the thing they'll be bitching about!) [0]: http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-again.ht…

There seems to be considerable disagreement in the field. Why is it news (I really would like to know!)? + Kobakhidze explaining neutron experiments: https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.4161 + http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4289/is-gravity-an-entropic… + Lubos Motl: http://motls.blogspot.nl/2010/01/erik-verlinde-why-gravity-cant-be.htm… and http://motls.blogspot.nl/2010/01/erik-verlinde-comments-about-entropic… It's nice to see that also experts in these highly specified fields quarrel about what it means to be "entropic" and "irreversible", etc.

I don't think so. The link [1] I posted is crackpot. See also: * https://motls.blogspot.com/2006/05/crackpot-papers-on-arxiv.html * https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0605023 (dated 2006)