Spinor Info

The shot(s) that reverberated around the world…

Nov 022023

Imagine the following sequence of events:

First, a second-rate power suffers a terrorist attack as part of a festering political crisis that has been going on for many years. This attack is the proverbial last drop in the bucket: they feel they must respond, and launch a punitive military expedition that may not be well planned and might even fail, despite their apparent superiority.
A rival second-rate power who supported the rebels that committed the terrorist act feels that it must intervene. Its voice has been ignored for far too long, and it has vital interests in the region.
A Great Power, in support of the first second-rate power as part of a long-standing alliance, steps in, reluctantly because they do not want to get embroiled in someone else’s war, but convinced that their actions are unavoidable.
Another Great Power, in reaction, steps in as well because it feels that it is necessary essential to do so in order to maintain the existing world order and their position therein.

What did I just describe? The October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas? The increasingly hostile response by Iran? A possible intervention by the United States assisting Israel, leading to direct conflict with Russia who are already active in the region and embroiled in conflict elsewhere?

Nope. I was describing something that happened 109 years ago, when Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip murdered Austria-Hungary’s heir to the throne. Austria-Hungary’s punitive expedition against Serbia was launched in response. This led to Russia’s decision to enter the war, followed by the German Empire and ultimately, Britain.

Yet, though the analogy is far from perfect, the parallels are unmistakable. And to be honest, frightening.

This is why I don’t think of 10/7 as Israel’s 9/11. Nope. It’s our era’s Sarajevo.

We have been living in a golden era that has no precedent in human history. Pax Americana, which began in 1945 and was characterized by measures like the Marshall Plan that, instead of punishing Western Europe, helped the continent back onto its feet, has been keeping our world safe and prosperous for almost eight decades. No, not perfect, far from it. Millions still died in conflict. But it was millions, not billions, and the promised great conflict, a thermonuclear WW3, has not happened yet. Meanwhile, billions live in relative security, safety, and prosperity, enjoying decent lives, on a scale that truly has no historical parallel (though the period between 1849 and 1914 comes close.)

But ultimately, all good things must come to an end, they say. And this world order is coming apart at the seams. Alliances weaken. A rules-based world is no longer in vogue. Liberal democracies are losing their middle class, even as the same middle class votes for lower taxes and less government, forgetting that it was higher taxes and more government (reminding my good American friends of the late 1940s, 1950s, with the GI bill, the Interstate highway system or public education, all financed by taxing high incomes at rates not seen before or since) that built that prosperous, strong middle class in the first place. Other Western nations follow similar paths as the middle class shrinks and trust in the institutions of liberal democracy erodes.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe,” declared Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Minister at the time, on August 3, 1914 as his country was about to declare war on Germany. I fear that we are just a hair’s breadth away from our lamps-are-going-out moment. And just like Sir Edward Grey, responsible leaders of our times appear to feel increasingly helpless.

My latest papers

Astronomy, Personal, Physics No Responses »

Nov 012023

A few minutes ago, I checked Google News on my phone and lo and behold, there was a link to Universe Today, a new article discussing my latest manuscript on multiple gravitational lenses.

I knew that this was in the works, as the author approached me with some questions earlier in the day, but I didn’t expect it to appear this quickly, and, well, seeing it on my phone like this was a nice surprise.

Had the author asked, I’d have happily granted permission to use one of my generated images or animations involving multiple lenses.

Meanwhile, my paper on a four-satellite configuration used to detect deviations from Newtonian gravity was published by Astrophysics and Space Science, one of the Nature journals. I am officially permitted (in fact, encouraged) by Springer to share the link to an online read-only version of the published paper.

Pointless waste

Economy, Electronics, Personal, Politics No Responses »

Oct 292023

Every so often, a Google Calendar reminder that I set up ages ago reminds me to charge our old cell phones. This is to prevent their batteries from dying as a result of a deep discharge.

Old cell phones, you ask? Well, yes. When we swapped phones, we kept the old ones for a while, just in case. And then we kept them because wiping them securely seemed like too much of a hassle. And then we kept them because, well, what’s the alternative? Landfill? Yes, I know, some service providers accept old phones, might even give you credit. But what happens to those old phones? Who needs them? Who can use them, with their ailing batteries and, worst of all, the absence of software updates, including security patches?

Indeed, this end of support was the main reason why we ditched phones in the past. And it really is tragic. Never mind phones old enough to have outdated specs. I have here a few devices that have hardware specs that would be reasonable on the low end even today. The devices are perfectly functional. Yet they are worthless.

This is just… conspicuous consumption, forced upon us by a society that measures the health of the economy not by its stability or sustainability but by growth. Pointless, limitless growth.

Never mind that in the meantime, the middle class shrinks, the income and wealth gap widens, society is becoming more polarized, ultimately threatening the very foundations of our Western liberal democracies. Who cares about such nonsense when there’s a new phone out there with half a dozen camera lenses and who knows what other nonsense just to make you believe that they’re worth your money and that it’s perfectly okay to throw away a capable, quality piece of electronics that would have many more years of useful life left?

Darnit, I realize I almost sound like a grumpy old commie, when in reality what I worry about is the future of a healthy capitalist society, characterized by freedom of conscience, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and freedom of enterprise. But there’s a fine line between freedom of enterprise and the “tragedy of the commons”, and when free enterprise undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy, perhaps it is advisable to do something about it before it is too late.

By the way, I really liked these Nokias. What a pity we had to get rid of them. They still function perfectly, but without security patches, they’re not worth the risk.

Driving on the right

History, Hungary No Responses »

Oct 212023

It was 82 years ago, back in 1941, that the country of my birth, Hungary, switched to driving on the right [link in Hungarian].

Streetcar with a large sign reminding the public to drive on the right

The decision has a sad history. It was prompted by the experience earlier that year when Hungary allowed the transit of Wehrmacht troops on their way to occupy Yugoslavia.

This was yet another step towards Hungary fully committing itself to the German effort, giving up any semblance of neutrality.

For Hungary’s prime minister at the time, Pal Teleki, this was the last drop [link in Hungarian] in the proverbial bucket. Early in the morning on April 3, 1941, he shot himself. His farewell letter to Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s leader at the time, simply stated, “I did not hold you back. I am guilty. Pal Teleki, April 3, 1941.”

Hungary went on to fight with the Germans against the USSR. When it became clear that the Germans cannot win, Horthy made a half-hearted attempt to extricate the country out of the war. Instead, he was removed from power by the rabid national socialist Arrow Cross, with support from occupying German troops, who in the remaining few months of the war assisted the Germans in the deportation and wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of Hungary’s Jews. In the end, the country was liberated but at a tremendous cost: Much of Budapest lay in ruins, devastated by a brutal Soviet siege, with all the city’s magnificent bridges across the Danube destroyed by the retreating Germans. Eventually, Horthy’s worst nightmare became reality: The “Bolsheviks” took over and stayed in power for more than 40 years, which included the a bloody intervention by the Soviets in 1956 to crush an anti-communist revolution.

Meanwhile, Budapest’s “millennial” subway, the continent’s first all-electric urban underground railway, continued to drive on the left all the way up to 1973, when the line was rebuilt, new rolling stock were introduced, and these trains, too, were switched to right-hand drive.

Tax dollars at work

Canada, Personal No Responses »

Oct 192023

Last night, I received notification from the CRA about an upcoming small tax refund.

When I logged on with my business account, it appeared to show that I had 3 unread messages, though there was a funny smudge before the ‘3’ in the notification icon.

When I clicked, I saw only one unread message. When I went back to the main screen, I now saw a ‘4’. That’s when I realized that the smudge was… a minus sign.

Indeed I had four messages shown in the mail interface, all read. So instead of counting the number of unread messages as a positive number, the UI showed the number of read messages as a negative number.

I have not yet received the refund. I hope that when (if?) it shows up in my bank account, it will have the correct sign.

History

History, Hungary, Politics No Responses »

Oct 172023

Here are two images. The first is from 1943.

By way of explanation, the gentleman on the left is Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s leader at the time. The gentleman on the right with the famous moustache needs no introduction.

The second image is from today, October 17, 2023:

The somewhat overweight gentleman on the left is Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister. The gentleman on the right is well known I suppose.

I don’t think I need to comment on why I opted to post these two pictures together. All I have to say is that this second image will come to haunt Hungarians in the future much the same way as the first.

More lensing

Astronomy, Personal, Physics No Responses »

Oct 122023

I’m doing more work on gravitational lensing. In particular, the little ray tracing model that I developed can now use actual astronomical images as sources. Here’s a projection of a nice spiral galaxy as it would be seen through a pair of non-coplanar, imperfectly lined up lenses:

Somehow, I suspect, no astronomer would recognize (at least not without a spectral analysis) that these are four images of the same rather nice-looking galaxy, NGC-4414:

These lensing examples also demonstrate how difficult it is to reconstruct either the original view, or the mass distribution of the lens itself, when all we see is something like the first image above.

The lamps are going out…

History, Politics No Responses »

Oct 122023

As I watch the lamps of the post-WW2 world order go out, one tiny, flickering light at a time, I am compelled to remember something that happened more than a century ago: When Sir Edward Grey, Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary at the time, remarked that “the lamps are going out all over Europe”.

We are not quite there yet. There is hope that sanity will prevail.

Yet I feel that that hope is fading, that time is running out.

In 1914, the point of no return, the trigger was Germany’s decision to attack neutral Belgium. It compelled Britain to declare war, and ultimately widened that war into the world’s first (or maybe second — I think the Napoleonic wars might qualify as World War 0) global conflict.

What the trigger will be this time, I do not know. I am reacting in part to the announcement that the West warned Hezbollah to stay out of Israel’s conflict with Hamas. But chances are it will be something else.

But it is coming, of that I am near certain, even as I dearly hope that I am dead wrong, that my pessimism is unwarranted, my concerns grossly misplaced.

War. War never changes

History, Politics No Responses »

Oct 112023

Without further ado, this cartoon sums up nicely what I think of recent events in the Gaza strip.

Gravitational lenses

Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics No Responses »

Oct 082023

I am simulating gravitational lenses, ray tracing the diffracted light.

With multiple lenses, the results can be absolutely fascinating. Here’s a case of four lenses, three static, a fourth lens transiting in front of the other three, with the light source a fuzzy sphere in the background.

I can’t stop looking at this animation. It almost feels… organic. Yet the math behind it is just high school math, a bit of geometry and trigonometry, nothing more.

NB: This post has been edited with an updated, physically more accurate animation.

Things that scare the living heck out of me

History, Politics 1 Response »

Oct 082023

The world is not heading in the right direction. Not by a long shot. The golden era that began in 1945 and saw an unprecedented number of people around the world find relative peace, prosperity, and security for nearly eight decades, may be coming to an unpleasant end. There is a Hungarian saying (“kutya is jódolgában megy a jégre”) that may have a loose equivalent in English in the form of the proverb, “you never miss the water till the well runs dry”.

Here are a few things that concern me, in no particular order:

Worsening wars: Russia-Ukraine, the (brand new) Hamas-Israeli war, hotspots elsewhere, China-Taiwan tension
The shrinking middle class, rising inequality and homelessness
Erosion of democratic values, faith in democratic/constitutional institutions
Rise of populism, ideological demagoguery and intolerance, political polarization, even violence
Rising economic instability, lack of economic and environmental sustainability

There are probably a few more that I have not mentioned, including petty domestic Canadian issues, such as the gloriously incompetent bills C-11/C-18 by which Canada tries to control online media.

Individually, each of these issues would be considered serious, but certainly not insurmountable. When they come all at the same time… The last time the world faced something similar was in the late 1920s, early 1930s. We know how well that turned out. Tens of millions of deaths, the rise of two of the worst totalitarian ideologies in history, a world war and the deployment of two nuclear weapons later…

Those nuclear weapons proved to be genuine peacemakers: Few can argue that they had a major role convincing all participants to play kind of nice, making sure that certain lines in the sand remain firmly uncrossed. But the inhibitions against their use are becoming weaker over time.

Am I being an alarmist? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure the people who woke up today to the sound of air raid sirens in Israel, or found themselves at the end of the day in Hamas custody as human shield hostages do not think so either.

Earlier today, I was looking at amazing pictures of an abandoned Siberian town, Kadykchan. Built at the cost of the lives of countless gulag prisoners, the town lost its population after the breakup of the USSR, and now serves as little more than a sad reminder of entire chapters of 20th century history. I think one of the images of that town that I saw might serve well as a cautionary tale.

How about coming to our senses before it’s too late, before we turn much of the world into a similar post-apocalyptic wasteland?

PS: My AI friend Claude suggested toning down this post a little, to make it less alarmist. I don’t want to. I am alarmed.

Hungarian Nobels

Physics, Science No Responses »

Oct 052023

I don’t know much about attosecond light pulses but my wife and I did note that one of the recipients of this year’s physics prize was a physicist who studied just a year ahead of Ildiko at ELTE (Eötvös University). She doesn’t recall if she ever bumped into Ferenc Krausz, though.

And of course one of the recipients of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine was Katalin Kariko, for her groundbreaking work in mRNA vaccines. Well-deserved indeed! I actually know (a little bit) more about mRNA vaccines than about attosecond physics, which might seem odd, considering that physics is my home turf, and organic chemistry is like an alien landscape. But the generation of ultrashort photon pulses is a very specialized field of study, to which I never paid much attention.

Anyhow, Kariko and Krausz are now added to that long list of scientists who were born, and studied in, Hungary, but who eventually ended up abroad, where they did the bulk of the work that earned them this recognition.

Heat wave

Local Ottawa, Weather and Climate No Responses »

Oct 032023

Here’s my phone screen as of a few minutes ago:

That’s in Centigrade of course.

What can I say? OK, our balcony thermometer only shows 28.3 C. Even so… not exactly typical early October weather for Ottawa.

Half a million years

History No Responses »

Sep 302023

So this has been in the news lately, too: a discovery of remnants of a wooden structure that is almost half a million years old.

It is truly incredible. These tools, these worked pieces of now petrified wood, predate the emergence of homo sapiens by several hundred thousand years.

Not for the first time I am left wondering just how much of the past will remain forever hidden from us. The earliest human whose name is known to us lived roughly 5000 years ago. Let that sink in for a moment. Modern human behavior began roughly 100,000 years ago, give or take. Presumably, this behavior involved language, social structures and, well, names. These were our ancestors, millions and millions of them, who inhabited the Earth for countless generations. And we don’t even know their names.

And now this, some 476,000 year old logs along with simple stone tools that were used to shape them. That suggests some form of permanence. Which implies a structured society. Skills, transferred from one generation to the next. Language. Culture. About which we know nothing.

Half a million years. That is, 100 times what counts as recorded history. An eyeblink in geologic terms, to be sure, but for us humans? The word that pops into my mind is… humbling.

From out of this world

Space No Responses »

Sep 292023

I’ve been meaning to mention this: A few days ago, the sample capsule of the OSIRIS-REx mission returned safely to the Earth, carrying inside a sample taken from the asteroid Bennu.

This is a remarkable achievement, ~~the first~~* successful sample return of its type. I wonder what we will learn from the material that was obtained, but I’m sure it will reveal some intriguing secrets, especially about the history and formation of the solar system.

Love the way the capsule was sitting on the ground, upright, not even tilted. Could it be more picture perfect than this?

I am also mildly (but pleasantly) surprised that I have not heard any panicmongering about a capsule bringing back extraterrestrial microbes or whatever. OK, I wasn’t specifically looking but still. It’s a relief.

* I don’t know what possessed me when I wrote “first”; granted, OSIRIS-REx brought back a lot more material, supposedly, but the first successful such missions were the two Hayabusa missions of the Japanese Space Agency.

Falling antimatter

Physics No Responses »

Sep 292023

OK, not exactly a surprising result but still, a fantastic experimental achievement: Yes, Virginia, antimatter falls downward.

Why is this important? Well, we kind of knew that it was inevitable. I mean, if antimatter were to fall upward, it’d have meant that our entire understanding of gravitation is wrong. That even our understanding of special relativity is probably wrong.

So it was a rather safe bet that antimatter follows the same geodesics as normal matter and falls downward.

But physics, lest we forget it, is ultimately not about erudite speculation. It is about experiment and observation.

And this amazing experiment achieved the almost impossible: it observed antihydrogen atoms in a vertical vacuum chamber at cryogenic temperatures and, as expected, most of those hydrogen atoms ended up at the bottom.

Moffat’s finite quantum field theory

Personal, Physics No Responses »

Sep 162023

My friend John Moffat has a finite quantum field theory that, I think, deserves more attention than it gets.

The theory is nonlocal (then again, so is quantum physics to begin with). However, it does not violate causality. So its nonlocality is a mathematical curiosity, not a physical impossibility.

The essence of the theory is present in the form of its “nonlocal field operator”. Given, e.g., a scalar field in the form $\phi(x),$ the field is transformed as

$$\tilde\phi(x)=\int d^4x’f(x-x’)\phi(x’).$$

Now if we just used the Dirac delta-function $f(x-x’)=\delta^4(x-x’),$ we’d get back $\phi(x).$ But what if we use some other function, the only restriction being that $f(x)$ must be an entire function, which is to say, unambiguously defined without poles or singularities over the entire complex plane?

Well, then, assuming again that $f(x)$ is an entire function, we can integrate iteratively in parts, until we arrive at an expression in the form,

$$\tilde\phi(x)={\cal F}(\partial_x)\phi(x),$$

where ${\cal F}(\partial_x)$ is a derivative operator, typically some power series in the form $\lambda_i\partial_x^i$, acting on $\phi(x).$

Why is this good for us? Because this field redefinition can suppress high-energy divergences in the theory, essentially doing away with the need for renormalization, which, of course, is a Big Claim indeed but I think John’s theory works.

John’s first substantive papers on this topic were titled Finite quantum field theory based on superspin fields (J. W. Moffat, Phys. Rev. D 39, 12 (1989)) and Finite nonlocal gauge field theory (J. W. Moffat, Phys. Rev. D 41, 4 (1990)). Unfortunately these papers predate arxiv.org so only the paywalled versions are available. They are beautiful papers that deserve more recognition. More recently, John wrote another paper on the subject, collaborating with a student. One of these days, I’m hoping to spend some time myself working a bit on John’s theory because I believe it has merit: The theory appears to remain causal despite the nonlocal operator, and by doing away with the need for renormalization, it makes canonical quantization almost trivially possible. I keep wondering if there is, perhaps, a catch after all, but if that’s the case, I have yet to find it.

Left-wing libertarian

Personal, Politics No Responses »

Sep 122023

Yes, that’s me. At least according to The Political Compass.

It does not surprise me much, mind you. While I am not a wild-eyed, “woke”, progressive “social justice warrior” (in fact, I am increasingly a deeply fed up with the “woke” lot), many of my views tend to align broadly with the traditional left. I also reject authoritarianism in all forms, and while I don’t endorse unconstrained freedom (e.g., in the economy), I largely view constraints as a necessary evil, not as a universal solution.

And, of course, I absolutely, strongly, vehemently reject any and all forms of personality cults.

So here, then, is my question: Given the direction our societies are heading, will there be room for left-wing libertarians like me in the future? Authoritarianism seems to be so much in vogue these days, be it the culture of intolerance in the name of tolerance as practiced by the woke left, or the more traditional authoritarianism of the nationalist right. The common theme that unites them is their rejection of liberal democracy’s core systems of institutions.

To offer an idea of what the four quadrants represent: Left-wing authoritarians (red, upper left) include Stalin and Mao. Joe Biden and Donald Trump both qualify as right-wing authoritarians (blue, upper right) according to the Compass, though I am sure not nearly as extreme as Pinochet or Mussolini, also in the same quadrant. Hegel or Ayn Rand along with von Mises are right-wing libertarians (purple, lower right). The green quadrant (lower left), where I found myself, apparently includes Gandhi, Mandela and Noam Chomsky. Urgh. I so disagree with Chomsky on many things. Oh well, these are big quadrants.

High, Low, Middle

Books, History, Politics No Responses »

Sep 122023

In his “1984”, Eric Arthur Blair, better known under the pen name George Orwell, at one point has the protagonists reading a book about the history of oligarchical collectivism, the dominant ideology of the totalitarian “IngSoc” regime of Oceania. They read,

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low […] The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. […] For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High.

So here is the thing: Liberal democracy is an aberration. An outlier. A period in history with no real “High”. We have no emperors, Kaisers, Caesars or Sultans. Monarchs, maybe, but mere figureheads in constitutional monarchies, not tyrants. In places like Canada, the United States, Western Europe and many other parts of the world, only the Middle and the Low exist. To be sure, the Middle can still be pretty darn powerful: political dynasties, tycoons and captains of industry, even public figures like media personalities wield substantial power. But their might is constrained by the system of institutions that we call liberal democracy: rule of law, freedom of enterprise, freedom of conscience, civil liberties or the separation of powers among them.

But this is not good enough, just not good enough for many among the elites of the Middle. They want more. Always more. And they fight. Throughout much of history, their enemy was the High. But in a liberal democracy, it is now the system of institutions that they fight against. Yet the tactics are the same. They enlist the Low. Don’t trust the system, they tell the Low. Elections are fake. Judges are corrupt or biased. Government lies to you. The rule of law is “weaponized”, they assert. Whatever it takes… but the real objective is to abolish the very constraints that prevent the Middle from becoming the new High.

And they are succeeding. Just look at the range of countries that are now on lists characterizing their retreat from democracy. Look at all the populists who are systematically undermining key pillars of liberal democracy, such as freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, even the electoral process. Will they succeed? I’d argue that they already succeeded in a number of countries and they are well on their way to success in many other places.

Liberal democracy, after all, is not a normal state of affairs for humanity. It’s an exception. It is no accident that some of the greatest 20th century writers of science-fiction, such as Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert, did not envision a democratic future. Asimov’s future in Foundation was a monolithic Galactic Empire that persisted for well over 10,000 years. Herbert’s Dune similarly envisioned a feudal society.

And if history is any guide, when the would-be tyrants succeed, they all too often will continue to maintain a semblance of democracy. After all, for centuries following the demise of the Roman Republic, emperors continued to issue decrees and coins bearing the acronym SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus, falsely suggesting that Rome is still governed by a Senate that answers to the people, not by an all-powerful emperor. But this is just a cheap conjurer’s trick to assure the masses, the Low: All that is being done is done for them, and in their name.

Here’s My Brightest Diamond, singing about High Low Middle. Not sure if they were inspired by Orwell, but it’s strangely appropriate.

Look before you leap…

Personal, Physics No Responses »

Sep 122023

I gave a talk on the Solar Gravitational Lens in Montreal back in July, using the above title.

Video of the talk is now available online, courtesy of the Interstellar Research Group.

I just listened to it myself and I didn’t cringe too much hearing my own voice or watching myself, which is probably a good sign?

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