The future of big physics

When it comes to research in experimental physics in areas that already exist, the frontiers that are usually explored are those of precision and size.

In the case of the precision frontier, the idea is to measure something more precisely than it has been done before because with greater precision there is a better chance of finding disagreement with theoretical expectations. Such disagreements (or ‘anomalies’), especially if they persist and are recognized as not being due to some errors in experiment or theoretical calculations, are the basis for thinking that there might be something new going on and may lay the foundations for some kind of breakthrough.

The other frontier is to extend the range of the parameters and in the case of high-energy physics, that means going to higher and higher energies. But this is enormously expensive. The Large Hadron Collider that was built at CERN at a cost of billions of dollars reached the existing energy limit and it resulted in the detection of the long-sought Higgs boson.
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“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Fed chair?”

In the classic 1964 film Becket, in 1170 AD King Henry II of England (played by Peter O’Toole), angered by the opposition of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket (played by Richard Burton), expresses his frustration by saying “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Four knights who heard this interpreted it as a command and, no doubt seeking to curry favor with their boss by showing how loyal they were, they then murdered Becket. This event is a historical fact, though those are likely not the exact words used by Henry II, especially since he spoke only Latin and French and his words had to be later translated into English. Ever since then, that sentence has been invoked whenever someone in power has a rival removed without explicitly ordering it.

The phrase is commonly used in modern-day contexts to express that a ruler’s wish may be interpreted as a command by their subordinates. It is also commonly understood as shorthand for any rhetorical device allowing leaders to covertly order or exhort violence among their followers, while still being able to claim plausible deniability for political, legal, or other reasons.

This episode immediately came to my mind when I heard that Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, had been subpoenaed as part of a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve by the department of justice. Trump has repeatedly railed against Powell because he did not reduce interest rates as frequently and as rapidly as he wanted him to and it appears that a quartet of Trump sycophants interpreted this the way Henry II’s knights did, that they needed to remove Powell.
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The false claims by DOGE and Musk

By now, we should all be making the default assumption that any claims made by Trump and anyone in his administration are lies unless backed up by evidence showing that it could be true.

Ali Velshi breaks down the false claims made by Elon Musk and his DOGE that they saved the country a huge amount of money. Not only did they not do that, they caused a vast amount of damage.

What the internet and now AI reveal about us

What the internet and the latest forms of AI have revealed is that many people harbor the ugliest of impulses. People are likely to have had ugly impulses all along but only those in their physical proximity knew about them, if at all. But with the internet and social media, these people are able to not only anonymously reach a much wider audience but now with AI, they are able to find ways to exhibit those impulses in new and increasingly disgusting ways, as this article reveals. They are taking picture of real women (and even children) and doctoring them in sexually explicit ways, a process known as ‘nudification’. The targets of these new ways of attack are usually women, of course.

Such doctoring of images have been occurring since the invention of photography but it used to require sophisticated skills But now pretty much anyone can use the freely available AI (such as Elon Musk’s Grok) to generate doctored images of people and then share them widely through social media channels (like Musk’s X), while those companies seem to make little or no effort to find ways to prevent such abuse. And the situation is getting rapidly worse, on a time scale of days.
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Blog comment policy

I said that at the beginning of every month, I would repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month. I stopped doing so after awhile because I thought that at least long time readers would have absorbed the message. But it seems like the reminders are necessary, since there have been violations, some seemingly accidental and some so egregious that I have had to take action. But here is the general policy again.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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Another day, another murder by ICE

The thuggish and murderous rampage by ICE that is terrorizing the country continues, and now we have the murder of a woman on the streets of Minneapolis. There is video of the event that shows her trying to drive away and being shot multiple times by ICE agents. Trump is of course lying about what happened, claiming that she ran over the ICE agent when the video clearly shows nothing of the sort. There is only one word to describe it: murder.

Here is a video of the murder and the aftermath showing ICE preventing a physician from checking on the victim.

The mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey was unequivocal in his condemnation of the murder, not mincing his words.


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Christmas messages

I know that the Christmas season is over but I found some amusing stuff that I wanted to share just to break up the bad news that has been happening recently.

It is the custom in the UK for the monarch to give a Christmas message to the nation and the satirical puppet show known as Spitting Image provides a parody. (Thanks to commenter brigerjohannson.)

Another tradition that began in 1993 is for the UK’s Channel 4 to give an alternative message to the monarch’s speech and this year US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was surprised to be asked.

Here is Kimmel’s message.

Noam Chomsky and Epstein

I have long been an admirer, from my college days in Sri Lanka when I first came across his work, of Noam Chomsky, for his tireless support of oppressed people around the world, his deep analyses of the media, and his relentless critiques of the role of the US in creating and perpetuating injustices. He is not just one of the premier public intellectuals, he has been an inspiration of those seeking radical change around the globe.

Hence it came as a shock when the latest release of photographs from the Epstein files showed him flying with him in the latter’s private jet. Noam Chomsky? That Epstein would seek to ingratiate himself with Chomsky was no surprise, since Epstein, when not being an active pedophile, loved to surround himself with renowned intellectuals and used his wealth to buy that access, possible to compensate for the fact that he himself was not one. But what was Chomsky doing with a low-lifelike him? Many former admirers of Chomsky have been quick to to condemn him and Chomsky himself has not responded.

Michale Albert is someone who has known Chomsky well over five decades. Albert and Lydia Sargent founded the progressive magazine Z in 1987 as part of ZCommunications, later changed to ZNetwork. Albert has long been a friend of Chomsky and is possibly the best person to try and explain what happened and he has done so in a long essay that is well worth reading.

The first thing I learned is the reason for Chomsky’s silence. He suffered a devastating stroke in 2023 when he was 95 years old and has been unable to communicate since then. As Albert writes, following the release of the photo of Chomsky with Epstein:
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The new imperialism, just like a very old imperialism

It us becoming more clear what Trump intends with his attack on Venezuela and his abduction of its president Nicolas Maduro and his wife and bringing them to the US. He dismissed what seemed the likely choice to replace Maduro, the Trump-worshipping opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, in favor of Maduro’s vice-president Delcy Rodríguez, someone who had worked with Maduro for years.

Trump is signaling what is going on.

The prospect of the United States seizing direct control of Venezuela appeared to recede on Sunday after the shocking seizure of President Nicolás Maduro – but US officials said Washington was keeping a 15,000-strong force in the Caribbean and might make a fresh military intervention if Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, did not accommodate their demands.

While Rodríguez kept up a defiant tone in public, the substance of conversations she had had in private with US officials was not clear.

In the aftermath of Maduro’s abduction on Saturday, Donald Trump said the US would “run” the South American country of 30 million people. On Sunday he warned Rodríguez to heed US wishes. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” he told the Atlantic.

Rodríguez, 56, had on Saturday pledged fealty to Maduro and condemned his capture as an “atrocity” but the New York Times reported that Trump officials several weeks ago identified the technocrat as a potential successor and business partner partly on the basis of her relationship with Wall Street and oil companies.

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What next in Venezuela?

I have refrained from commenting on the outrageous act of imperialism by the US in Venezuela because the immediate aftermath of such things is confusion and misinformation and it takes a while for a more accurate picture to emerge. What I did expect to see was that after deposing the president Nicolas Maduro, the US would announce that there was an interim president chosen by them and that there would be statements by at least some top military leaders that they supported the new leader. That is usually how these things play out.

But not in this case. For some reason, Trump has been dismissive about the person that I expected that he would announce as the new leader, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, which is surprising given that she is an ardent Trump supporter. The fact that she had just won the Nobel peace prize would give her some credibility, even if some of us have long dismissed that prize as worthless. But Trump dismissed the idea of her taking over saying that she was not consulted and that she “doesn’t have the support” within Venezuela.

Instead Trump said that the vice-president Delcy Rodríguez would be the new president and would work with the US. She was sworn in as president but denied that she had agreed to work with Trump and said that Maduro was the only president. There have also been no statements from the military leaders either way. Of course, it is possible that secret deals have been made that will trickle out over the coming days but as of now, it looks like the goal of the US attack was to capture Maduro and his wife and there was no real plan for what to do after that, which is really strange.
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