The Safe Disappointing Success of LHC

Steven Weinberg in a recent talk states concerning the scientific reasons behind investing billions of dollars in the Large Hadron Collider:

• Many of us are terrified that the LHC will discover a Higgs particle and nothing else. That would just confirm the standard model, which everybody believes already. It would not point the way to further progress in solving a deeper problem that physics faces—how to add gravity to the unified theory of the other forces.
• It would be much more exiting if the Higgs particle is not found rather than if it is found.
• The Higgs is well within the reach of the LHC.
• It would be ridiculus to say that LHC was designed to discover the Higgs.
• No-one will ever see a Higgs particle. What will be seen is its decay particles.
• It is highly likely that the Higgs will be found.
• If the Congress had not had the imbecility to cancel the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, it would have been discovered long ago here in Texas. 

As an scientist, amateur particle physicist and taxpayer I get very intrigued by statements like this: LHC would be a success if the Higgs is found, although a bit disappointing, and even more successful if it is not found, although also a bit disappointing...

Björklund Vill Förstatliga Skolmatematiken: Hurrah!

Skolminister Jan Björklund propagerar idag på DN Debatt för att skolan åter skall förstatligas efter att ha blivit kommunaliserad i början på 90-talet av dåvarande skolminister Göran Persson. Tanken är att staten bättre än kommunerna kan bära huvudansvaret för skolans kärnuppgift = kunskapsfömedling. 

Detta kan vara riktigt. Förstatligad matematik kan vara bättre än kommunaliserad matematik, eftersom matematiken är densamma för alla kommuner, t o m densamma för alla stater i EU...

Kanske har Björklund fått kalla fötter efter att ha allokerat 500 milj att spridas jämnt över landets kommuner för att med hjälp av en stor mängd småprojekt lyfta landets matematikundervisning ur det svarta hål den hamnat i. Kanske har Björklund insett att detta kommunaliserade pengaregn inte kommer att ha någon effekt, medan en koordinerad genomtänkt statlig satsning möjligen skulle kunna ha det? 

Kanske kan jag få svar vid kommande möte med Utbildningsdepartmentet. Av de 500 miljonerna är hittills 87 utdelade till kommunerna. Men det återstår, låt oss se, 500 - 87 = 413 miljoner som skulle kunna användas till ett 

• statligt lyft av skolmatematiken 
• byggd på ett statligt lyft av matematiklärarutbildningen
• byggd på ett statligt lyft av universitetsmatematiken.

Vilket lyft för Sverige det skulle kunna bli! Vilket lyft för skolministern! Hoppas kunna klargöra detta vid mötet. Kanske finns det några matematikprofessorer som vill komma med?

413 miljoner är ganska mycke pengar! Jämfört med de 50 milj/år som är det totala stödet till matematik från VR.

The lonesome Polar Bear Researcher

On the upcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Conference website it is reported that the image of a lonesome polar bear on an ice flake is used so often to illustrate global warming that it is almost becoming a cliché. 

There is another seemingly endangered species, namely dissident polar bear researchers: The price for speaking out against global warming is exile from your peers.

This tells the hearbreaking story of the polar bear researcher Mitchell Taylor, who has caught more polar bears and  worked on more polar bear groups than any  other, who was effectively ostracized  from the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG)  specifically because he has publicly  expressed doubts that there is a crisis due to carbon dioxide emissions. 

So Mitchell Taylor ended up as a very lonesome polar bear researcher concluding: “It’ s a  good way to maintain consensus”.

But cheer up Mitchell: You are not so lonesome, and neither is the polar bear on the ice flake. 

Your numbers are increasing!

I Simulate and Feel, Therefore I Exist!

In Soul as Simulation of Body I suggested to interprete Descartes I think, therefore I exist, as I simulate, therefore I exist, by viewing the function of the brain to be to model the body and the world around and perform simulations with the model by mental computation with the ultimate goal of steering the body to survival. The role of the soul would thus be to perform a form of optimization towards survival of the body by controling the body based on simulations of the body. 

Is there any place for human feelings in such a mathematical soul seeking to maximize some goal function?  What role do they play in the interaction body-soul? Isn't it enough that the brain sends orders to the body based in computations with input from the body? Are feelings important for survival?

Yes, they are claims neurologist Antonio Damasio  in Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain: Feelings help the soul to perform optimization towards survival. How? By connecting mental states to bodily states. By this mechanism the goal function to be optimized by the brain is given a value in terms of bodily degrees of satisfaction, relaxation, functionality, harmony, warmth...

Without feelings with bodily representation the soul would not be motivated to perform the mental work required for the optimization...the carrot to higher level optimization required for planning and e.g. mathematics would be missing...as well as the good warm bodily sensation of doing the right thing or talking to the right person...the optimization would not be performed and adaption towards survival would suffer...I simulate and feel, therefore I exist...

If now feeling is a necessary carrot for thinking,  is it also necessary to supply artificial intelligence with feelings? With a given goal function, artificial intelligence would not seem to require feelings, just some input of electrical energy. Is then the role of feelings in human intelligence to allow the goal function to change in response to internal and external changes? A feeling that it is time to break up from job or marriage, would then be the starting point to decide to change the goal function to actually do it, only later motivated by logic and rationale. Feeling before a posteriori rational decision?

The Finnish-Swedish modernist poet Gunnar Björling's poem Dog bolting glad  describes the happy feeling connected to a body which is functioning well, compare: Bolt running happy.

According to Damasio the feeling brain ultimately depends on the living cells it directs, to get input to sensations. A free-floating brain is unthinkable. In the talk Where computation and fabrication meet: using computers to mimic biology Zack Booth Simpson views the life of a cell as a form of computation in which the cell by interacting with its environment constructs/computes itself.  The life of a brain thus depends on the life of the cells it controls.

Similarly, the life of the US president is dependent on the lives of the citizens who somehow earn their living and multiply independently while following the tax laws of the president, 

more or less. The joy of the president then comes from the joy of the people...

The cell life thus seems primordial with the brain feeding on the living cells while also controling them in some kind of symbiotic unity in the spirit of Spinoza...

Mathematics Education at Helsinki University of Technology

This is a little preparation for my talk at Seminar on New Perspectives in Teaching Mathematics Oct 26 at Helsinki University of Technology HUT. The web information about mathematics education at HUT reads:

The Institute of Mathematics at the Helsinki University of Technology is responsible for teaching essentially all the mathematics needed in engineering. The three main objectives are the following:

• To organize and teach undergraduate courses, aiming to give students the basic mathematical knowledge needed to complete their engineering studies.
• To transfer the latest know-how in mathematics and scientific computing to the scientists in different fields of engineering.
• To carry out research work within mathematics and to provide a stimulating environment for the training of young researchers.

Undergraduate courses are taught in large units, in which the specific features of each engineering department can be taken account for, and the continuous reformation of the material can be carried out in a flexible way. These courses cover essentially all fields of mathematics needed in engineering. Undergraduate courses are organized, aiming to give students the basic mathematical knowledge needed to complete their engineering studies.

The goals of the basic courses are uniformly formulated to be:

• Provide the basic skills needed in the degree program concerning the subject matter of the course. 
• Strengthen mathematical reasoning skills. 
• Practise in the mathematical formulation of applied problems. 
• Familiarize with applications of methods presented.

These statements appear to be self-referential with the objective of the mathematics courses described to be the study of mathematics or the mathematics needed to complete engineering studies. It is unclear what is meant by 

• mathematical reasoning skills: theorem - proof?
• mathematical formulation: only formulation not solution? 
• familiarize with applications of methods: not mastery of techniques?

The curriculum appears to be standard which in my presentation is described as OLD

with unclear answers to the questions of What, Why and How? 

We compare with the following short answers of a  NEW reformed curriculum:

• What: computational calculus/linear algebra + programming
• Why: computational simulation of complex systems in science and engineering
• How: construction of computer games.

In short:

• NEW: engineering mathematics = simulation technology.
  

Möte med Utbildningsdepartementet

Ser man på, Utbildningsdepartmentet hör till slut av sig, efter viss påtyrckning:

• Hej, som jag förstår vill du diskutera matematikundervisningen och Skolinspektionens utvärderingar. Har du några förslag på tider? Med vänliga hälsningar, Fredric Skälstad 

Jomenvisst, vill jag det och svarar:

• Precis! Jag har ett öppet schema nästa vecka tex eller senare och kan anpassa mig till Departements önskemål. Är på möte om matematikutbildning vid Helsingfors Tekniska Högskola 26-27/10. Med tanke på frågans vikt och alla 500 miljoner tycker jag att möte med Jan Björklund borde kunna vara motiverat.

Skall rapportera om båda möten så småningom...

Obama Mathematics 2

Obama likes mathematics of large numbers:

• receives the Nobel Peace Prize of  $1 millon
• sends 21.000 more fighting troops to Afghanistan to a total of 68.000
• signs budget deficit of $1.4 trillion 10% of GNP
• prepares to sign a Copenhagen climate treaty with up to $1 trillion/year from developed nations corresponding to 20 times current total foreign aid.

To set these numbers into perspective, note that The International Monetary Fund recently set its estimate of the global losses from the financial crisis for 2007-2010 to be US$3.4-billion

less than one percent of $1 trillion. The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion synapses or connections.

Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and climate alarmism sceptic, discusses democracy vs climate treaty and climate myths vs national security.   Read and think and listen to a remarkable presentation: why truth, scientific truth, matters.

Computational Technology Laboratory

The homepage of Computational Technology Laboratory has been uppdated with videos of simulations of flapping bird, turbulent flow around a car, flying circus cow, fluid-structure interaction, shocks in compressible flow, and there is more to come...Take a look!

No Consensus on Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

One of the bloggers on Blog Action Day 2009 on Climate Change is Erik Svensson, professor of Zoological Ecology at Lund University, claiming that there is scientific consensus on AGW based on 80-90% majority vote according to some poll.

But scientific truth is not determined by polls and majority consensus, only by scientific arguments and debate by living scientists, as carefully motivated in

• Consensus in Science and Sports: An Inconvemient Truth 
  
• Scientific Consensus = ??

Among the 20-10% of sceptics to climate alarmism, according to the poll, there are many prominent, serious and honest scientists, and the arguments and facts put forward by these sceptics are not annihilated in one stroke by referring to a majority consensus. Or like Erik Svensson does, by hinting at the existence of sceptics to e.g. Darwin.

In science disagreement can only be settled in scientific discussion between scientists using 

scientific arguments. If such discussions and direct confrontations are blocked by a majority claiming to determine truth by majority consensus, then science is in danger.

The Copenhagen Climate Conference could have been an arena for such discussions, but will

now be a one-sided AGW UN event with a preset political agenda:

• The Climate Conference in Copenhagen is essential for the worlds climate and the Danish government and UNFCCC is putting hard effort in making the meeting in Copenhagen a success ending up with a Copenhagen Protocol to prevent global warming and climate changes. 
  

In these hard efforts, sceptics to climate alarmism cannot be part.

To mix politics into science may be tempting to both politicians and scientists, but in the long run it is a disaster for science. The anticipated political failure of the Copenhagen meeting will put a blow to science as well...The true reason for the failure is that there is no scientific consensus on AGW! 

Or the other way around: The Copenhagen meeting will not be a failure for the sceptics to climate alarmism, but science as a whole will suffer. 

On non-consensus on sea level rise, read interview with Axel Mörner. Read Mörner's letter to the President of the Maldives.

Read also Top British boffin: Time to distch the climate consensus: 

• Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you'd expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom. Back then, he was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall - and as we found out in a telephone interview - he has come out of the climate change closet as an outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN's IPCC, the "consensus", the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called "deniers" to contribute to those debates.
  

On Al Gore's reaction to non-consensus, see CNN report Global warming threat drives public policy decisions though issue is far from settled.

Mathematics Education in the IT-Society: What, Why and How?

Here is a draft of my upcoming talk at Seminar on New Perspectives in Teaching Mathematics

at Helsinki University of Technology. This type of seminar can not take place at KTH.

We compare 

• OLD: before the IT-age: without computer
• OLD: unreasonable effectiveness of analytical mathematics in sciences: FALSE
• OLD: not understandable + not useful
• OLD =  math education of today 
• NEW: in the IT-age: with computer
  
• NEW: reasonable effectiveness of computational mathematics in sciences: TRUE.
• NEW: understandable + useful
• NEW = reform math of tomorrow
• Death and Rebirth of the Computing Engineer 1,  2,  3,  4.

We consider one major area of technology: fluid mechanics = experimental + mathematical:

• mathematical fluid mechanics = Navier-Stokes equations: turbulent solutions.

Facts:

• OLD: Cannot solve NS by analytical mathematics: turbulence
  
• NEW: Can solve NS using computational mathematics: turbulence.

Result:

• OLD: Incorrect cook-book formulas: useless: lift/drag mystery: flight mystery
• NEW: Correct computational solutions: useful: no mystery.

What:Why:How:Value

• OLD: analytical formulas: solve NS: pen/paper: useless
• NEW: simple analytical formulas + computation : solve NS : pen/paper + computer: useful. 

NEW: Solve 

          (DE)                                      du/dt = f(u,t)     (NS)

by time-stepping. To learn: 

• calculus: derivative
• integral = solution to du/dt = f(t)   
• construct by time-stepping: u(new) = u(old) + k f(old)
• elementary functions = solutions of simple DE: exp, log, sin, ...
  
• linear algebra: solve AX=B 
• discretization: Galerkin finite elements
• programming.

Mathematical fluid mechanics part of NEW mathematics education. 

NEW mathematics education:

• condensation: fewer formulas 
• expansion: general differential equations: richer applications 
• effectivization: Ockhams Razor
• understanding: principles  
• proof by construction step by step
• ability to simulate complex systems
• = simulation technology = technology for/with simulation
• = solve equations: convection/diffusion/reaction/wave...
• = computational fluid/solid/quantum/electromagnetics...
• construct - compute - analyze - understand - construct -  

NEW calculus:

• constructive -- computational
• Lipschitz continuity: | u(x) - u(y) | <  L | x - y |
• Derivative du/dx by linearization: | u(x) - u(y) - du/dx (x-y) | <  C| x - y | | x - y |
• definitions of continuity + derivative without using limits
• bisection: limit
• fixed point iteration  x = g(x): limit
• Newton f(x) = 0: limit
• Solve DE: du/dt = f(u,t) by time-stepping: universal 

NEW linear algebra:

• vector, matrix, linear combination, basis
• analytic geometry
• Gaussian elimination
• Jacobi iteration
• eigenvalue
• orthogonality.

Mathematics = ??

• NEW: formulate + solve equation = simulation technology = engineering mathematics
• OLD :mathematics = art + beauty + logic + theorem + proof = ?

Theorem -- proof  vs  constructive proof  -  construction = theorem:

• NEW: proof by construction: theorem
  
• OLD: theorem: proof by ??

Constructive mathematics = computer game:

• engineering mathematics = simulation technology 
• simulation technology = computer games
• math education = how to construct computer games.

Mathematical computer games:

• bouncing ball: geometry in 2d and 3d + visualization + interaction
• spring-mass system: Newton + Hooke law
• fluid mechanics: Newton law + Eulerian description
• solid mechanics: Hooke's law + Lagrangian description
• fluid-structure interaction: action games, sports.
• science games: quantum ....  cosmology. 

Summary:

• global competition requires engineering education reform: NOKIA?
  
• computer game math: active, interactive, think, do, learn, understand, open 
• strong resistance to math education reform: passive, sit, look, confusion, closed
• now: collapse of traditional math education+  birth of reform math
• horrible time for classical analytical mathematics
• wonderful time for constructive computational mathematics!
• What: calculus + linear algebra + computer + programming
• Why: computer simulation of real world
• How: construct computer games. 

Realization: 

• Body&Soul program at Chalmers 1998-2005
• Simulation Technology at KTH 2011 - ??: Yes!!

Presentations:

• Computational Calculus: Mathematics of Our Time.
• Simulation Technology at Icarus
• Simulation Technology.