Red River

Red River (Japanese: 天は赤い河のほとり, Hepburn: Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori; lit. 'The Sky Is on the Banks of the Red River'), also known as Anatolia Story, is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Chie Shinohara. The series was published by Shōgakukan in their Sho-Comi magazine from January 1995 to June 2002 and was collected in 28 tankōbon volumes. It is published in English in North America by Viz Media. An anime television series adaptation produced by Tatsunoko Production is set to premiere in July 2026. 

As of March 2019, the manga had over 20 million copies in circulation, making it one of the best-selling manga series. In 2001, Red River won the Shogakukan Manga Award for the shōjo category.

From Wikipedia.

The river after which the series was named, the "Kızılırmak (Turkish pronunciation: [kɯˈzɯɫɯɾmak], Turkish for "Red River"), historically known as the Halys River (Ancient Greek: Ἅλυς), is the longest river flowing entirely within Turkey.

I read this manga series when my children were in middle school, basically in the early twenty-tens, not long after I began this blog, as one of the first really epic manga series that I'd read. American comics and graphic novels have almost no sub-genre that approximates this series. 

It is back on my radar screen because the first episode of an anime based upon this manga series was released today, and so far, so good. It is a pretty faithful and successful adaptation so far.

Why am I writing about it here?

Because this manga series was instrumental in spurring my interest in prehistory, anthropology, and historical linguistics, in a story that brought the late Bronze Age Hittite Empire to life and contributed a lot to me caring about all of these fields. Some of my own writing on the Hittites can be found here.

And honestly, while it has fictional and magical elements, much like Bronze Age legendary history works actually written at or within a few centuries of that time period, by and large, this series has stood the test of time and is broadly consistent with what archaeologists, anthropologists, ancient historians, and historical linguistics scholars still believe now.

What all of those disciplines lack, however, that historical fiction like this can provide, is synthesis, relatability, and meaning. Academic scholars tend to focus in on tiny details and cower from providing a larger narrative or connecting the dots for fear of being wrong. But doing so takes away the joy and allure of that once captivated the people who are doing the work and keeps them motivated enough to continue to do so. Historical fiction can give the dry piecemeal reconstructions life and a "vibe" allowing you to feel some sense of what life was like back then.

The fictional account does so in ways big and small. For example, while the dialog is in Japanese (and translated into English in the versions I consume), this series retains enough of the historically accurate Hittite proper names to make those names relatable and not so intimidating, when you encounter them as you study the actual history of the Hittite people, a culture the remains the source of pivotal and important open questions in the broader picture of the Bronze Age and Indo-European linguistics.

Even the magical and supernatural and religious aspects of the story, while not actually things that happened in the past, are largely consistent with the religious and metaphysical worldviews of the people who lived in that era in Anatolia.

JUNO Hype And Reality

A new neutrino physics experiment published a preprint with new measurements of neutrino oscillation constants. The new equipment works to high precision and will help fine tune the exact values of some the least precisely known experimentally measured parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. 

This is interesting to people who follow particle physics closely. It is also scientifically important. But honestly, it isn't that interesting to the average person with only a general interest in science.

But, Rory Harris at Live Science in a fit a yellow journalism in the science world, writes a story containing all sorts of nonsense about JUNO revealing beyond the Standard Model physics, as well as the usual, misleading blather about CP violation experimentation answering questions about the baryon asymmetry of the universe (which this experiment does not do).

A "No Hype" Science Journalism Stand-Out

Science journalism aimed at the educated (or not so educated) layman in the general public is prone to sensationalism and claims of new discoveries that aren't supported by the body text, or at least, aren't supported by the source and the general scientific community. But there are exceptions. 

One stand out is an article from Phys.org which is a source that often offends in this regard but doesn't this time. Its headline accurately states:

Theoretical physicists find Higgs boson does not seem to contain any harbingers of new physics

The headline conclusion, reached after twelve years of study since its discovery was announced on July 4, 2012, is familiar to readers of this blog, but deserves recognition for resisting sensationalism and restating the scientific consensus.  See, e.g., noting decays to a Z boson and a photon and here (summarizing the data to date). 

The article used as its touchstone has the following abstract and citation (and isn't itself, the headline suggests, a broad review article, and is instead one more mundane article confirming that the experimental study of the Higgs boson confirms the theoretical expectations for it):

We evaluate the top-bottom interference contribution to the fully inclusive Higgs production cross section at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. Although bottom-quark-mass effects are power suppressed, the accuracy of state-of-the-art theory predictions makes an exact determination of this effect indispensable. The total effect of the interference at 13 TeV is −1.99⁢(1)+0.30−0.15  pb, while the pure 𝒪⁡(𝛼4𝑠) correction is 0.43 pb. With this result, we address one of the leading theory uncertainties of the cross section.

Michał Czakon et al, "Top-Bottom Interference Contribution to Fully Inclusive Higgs Production", Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.211902

As additional context, Peter Higgs after whom the Higgs boson  is named, died in April of this year.

There is actually a slight Higgs boson anomaly, that is barely statistically significant locally (2.2 sigma), which would probably lose its statistical significance after considering look elsewhere effects, involving lower than expected Higgs boson decays to fermions (but the expected number of decays to bosons).

There are also a couple of low significance resonance "bumps" that have been touted as possible additional electromagnetically neutral Higgs bosons that have not been confirmed, one a bit below the Higgs boson mass of about 125 GeV, at about 96 GeV, and one or two a bit above it. Even if these "bumps" were confirmed to be real particles, there is no a priori reason to have any  confidence that they have anything to do with the Higgs boson.

How Do People Decide Which Scientists To Believe?

Examining and resolving in my own mind disputes between scientists is pretty much the essence of what I do on a daily basis, especially, but not only, at this blog. So, this study caught my attention. I suspect that my methods are more analytical and sourced than average, and view myself as kindred to "superforecasters" in my methods.

Uncertainty that arises from disputes among scientists seems to foster public skepticism or noncompliance. Communication of potential cues to the relative performance of contending scientists might affect judgments of which position is likely more valid. We used actual scientific disputes—the nature of dark matter, sea level rise under climate change, and benefits and risks of marijuana—to assess Americans’ responses (n = 3150). 

Seven cues—replication, information quality, the majority position, degree source, experience, reference group support, and employer—were presented three cues at a time in a planned-missingness design. The most influential cues were majority vote, replication, information quality, and experience. Several potential moderators—topical engagement, prior attitudes, knowledge of science, and attitudes toward science—lacked even small effects on choice, but cues had the strongest effects for dark matter and weakest effects for marijuana, and general mistrust of scientists moderately attenuated top cues’ effects. 

Risk communicators can take these influential cues into account in understanding how laypeople respond to scientific disputes, and improving communication about such disputes.

Branden B. Johnson, Marcus Mayorga, Nathan F. Dieckmann, "How people decide who is correct when groups of scientists disagree" Risk Analysis (July 28, 2023).

The Case For Warning Labels For Physics Articles

Current academic and scientific publishing norms call for certain factors to be called out in something akin to "warning labels" for personal interests of the authors that could bias the result (e.g. drug company sponsorship in research related to a drug), or the lack of peer review for materials released in advance of publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal.

But, there are other known factors which are at least as serious that make conclusions in scientific journal articles less credible. Failure to recognize these risk factors are an important reason that main stream media science reporting makes misleading reports about new scientific research. One solution to this problem is for these risk factors to be routinely called out in the same manner. 

In the spirit of free inquiry and not suppressing minority views, these risk factors should not be used to deny publication to such papers, however. Instead, the should only be used to alert readers with "yellow flags" to the need to be particularly skeptical of the conclusions in the papers rather than accepting them uncritically.

What are risk factors that should trigger warning labels in scientific papers in physics?

    Data Quality

(1) An observation relied upon for new physics has not been replicated by an independent research group. More generally, the paper relies upon a single observation (e.g. a single astronomy observation) to support broad theoretical conclusions. This certainly shouldn't be used to deny publication, somebody has to be the first to observe anything, but still calls for a warning label (see, e.g., the Opera experiment's superluminal neutrino measurement that turned out to be due to a flaw in the experimental measurement).

(2) The paper does not consider global statistical significance in addition to local statistical significance when consideration of global statistical significance is necessary for a sound evaluation of the notability of the observation. Failure to consider global statistical significance is an utterly predictable and inevitable way to make noise look like a signal.

(3) The paper relies for the statistical significance of its result upon the combined significance of multiple observations that are individually either not globally statistically significant or represent mild (less than 3 sigma) tensions with a null hypothesis, especially if the separate observations are assumed to have uncorrelated uncertainties (which is rarely true, even though it is hard to quantify the correlations). In part, this is because all manner of theories can be devised after the fact to connect what are actually unrelated statistical flukes due to measurement uncertainty.

(4) An observation relied upon has been contradicted by, or is in strong tension with, other observations of the same phenomena (i.e. the paper relies upon "outlier observations"). This warning should be heightened if the paper relies upon outlier observations to the exclusion of non-outlier observations of the same thing (see, e.g., papers based upon a recent outlier measurement of the W boson mass). Likewise, often there are strong discrepancies between inclusive and exclusive measurements of the same quantity, and considering only one of these without a well reasoned explanation for doing so should trigger a warning label. Several kinds of measurements have consistent disparities between different kinds of measurements of the same quantity of this kind.

(5) The observation relied upon is only marginally statistically significant (i.e. less than 3 sigma of global statistical significance), or the statistical significance of the result relied upon has decreased as more measurements have been made of the same thing. Again, there is nothing wrong with publishing these results, but they should be taken with a grain of salt, especially when used to support otherwise ill-motivated new physics (i.e. outcomes that haven't been predicted but not observed for a long time in some theory that hasn't been strongly disfavored by other evidence).

(6) The group making an observation relied upon has reported results later found to be incorrect or contradicted by multiple other observers of the same phenomena that they were incorrect upon in the past. 

    Literature Review And Authorship 

(7) Papers should clearly state that they are proposing or relying upon new physics rather than widely accepted existing physics. This warning should be heightened where the paper purports to explain an experimental anomaly with new physics within three weeks of a newly reported anomalous experimental result by someone not from the group that did the experiment (i.e. before adequate time has elapsed for papers writing non-new physics explanations to be released). The heightened warning is necessary to counter the fact that there is a rush to release ill-vetted new physics explanations immediately after a new result is announced, making any necessary corrections later, in order to get credit for being the first to discover a new physics phenomena in the unlikely case that the proposal is the correct one.  

(8) The paper relies upon a result from a "fake journal".

(9) None of the authors of the paper is a professional academic or researcher in the field in which it is written with a PhD. (Papers with a professional academic or researcher and also a co-author who is a student in the field, or an industry professional, or someone making contributions from outside the field such as a graphic designer who did the especially difficult figures for the paper or a native English language speaker who helped the authors write idiomatically, or an autodidact, however, do not require a warning label).

(10) A proposed new physics explanation of a phenomena is presented when the phenomena has purportedly been explained already without new physics in a published paper or preprint.

(11) A paper that explains an observation with new physics without first discussing and ruling out possible explanations that do not involve new physics, including the possibility that there are understated or overlooked sources of uncertainty or inaccuracy in the observations relied upon.

(12) The paper does not review the literature, or has identified a paper in its review of the literature that reaches a contrary result and does not contain an analysis engaging with the analysis of prior work that reaches a contrary result. The literature review is inadequate and shouldn't count as a literature review sufficient to avoid a warning label unless it identifies literature critical of an overall new physics research program that the paper advances (e.g. supersymmetry, string theory, or QCD axions) or states that the authors have looked for and not found any such criticisms. Often a simple Wikipedia search would reveal such criticisms, but only a minority of papers advancing new physics include these criticisms in their literature reviews (instead often stating that a theory is "well-motivated" based upon papers written decades earlier before criticisms of the research program had surfaced). It is O.K. to write and publish a "Note" or "Letter" without a full literature review and analysis, but any publication of this kind should come with a warning label to that effect.

A warning label oriented approach would provide an easy checklist for science reporters, for legitimate scientific journals considering sending articles out for peer review, and for peer reviewers, that even when the authors and/or publishers fail to address the points in it, could encourage greater quality control in scientific paper writing and would reduce the incentive to publish dubious speculative work.

In a related matter, when considering a scientist's or academic's publications in hiring, or for tenure or promotion, the papers published ought to be flagged in cases where the conclusions made were later refuted by other research or significantly revised due to errors identified by others, the research program did not pan out, or the papers have been cited unfavorably or critically. Current norms in the field call only for disclosures of papers in which papers are retracted due to academic dishonesty such as faked data or citations to non-existent literature  (which are, of course, "red flags" rather than "yellow flags").

Story Of Human Evolution Not Actually Rewritten

Deep inside a South African cave, researchers say they have discovered graves dug by our ancient, small-brained relatives more than 100,000 years before the oldest known human burials, a claim that would revise the story of our evolution.

From the Washington Post.

Yes, this story about Homo naledi is cool.

Does it revise our story of evolution? 

No.

Does it spark debate among people who knew the existing story prior to this discovery? 

Not really, beyond the fine details of interpretation of the site.

This is a side story about a dead end hominin species that existed contemporaneously in Africa with the most direct ancestors of modern humans. It is basically a story from The Silmarillion of hominin evolution. It is entertaining, especially for hard core human evolution fans, but it doesn't really advance the plot.

Meanwhile, John Hawks discusses another recent paper he has co-authored on Homo Naledi from ten years after the original find about H. Naledi teeth.

More than 150 hominin teeth, dated to ∼330–241 thousand years ago, were recovered during the 2013–2015 excavations of the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system, South Africa. These fossils comprise the first large single-site sample of hominin teeth from the Middle Pleistocene of Africa. Though scattered remains attributable to Homo sapiens, or their possible lineal ancestors, are known from older and younger sites across the continent, the distinctive morphological feature set of the Dinaledi teeth supports the recognition of a novel hominin species, Homo naledi. This material provides evidence of African Homo lineage diversity that lasts until at least the Middle Pleistocene. Here, a catalog, anatomical descriptions, and details of preservation and taphonomic alteration are provided for the Dinaledi teeth. Where possible, provisional associations among teeth are also proposed. To facilitate future research, we also provide access to a catalog of surface files of the Rising Star jaws and teeth.

Delezene, L. K., Skinner, M. M., Bailey, S. E., Brophy, J. K., Elliott, M. C., Gurtov, A., Irish, J. D., Moggi-Cecchi, J., de Ruiter, D. J., Hawks, J., & Berger, L. R., "Descriptive catalog of Homo naledi dental remains from the 2013 to 2015 excavations of the Dinaledi Chamber, site U.W. 101, within the Rising Star cave system, South Africa." 180  Journal of Human Evolution 103372 (2023) 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2023.103372

Cursed

The 2020 Netflix drama series "Cursed", is a vaguely Arthurian tale of a powerful fairy princess and a young man named Arthur, in a medieval world in which a powerful church is seeking to exterminate the fey. These fairies are human-like, with only subtle differences from the humans and a greater connection to nature, more another race of humans from an earlier time, than another type of being entirely.

While it is obviously fiction (fairies, magic, etc.), it does a better job, I think, at conveying the deeper emotional, social, and cultural reality and feel of the genocidal ethnic, racial and religious wars of the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age transitions (and beyond), than many non-fiction efforts to describe these historical events. Sometimes fiction can be truer than non-fiction at conveying the human essentials.

Indeed, the King Arthur story itself, is a legendary history of one such transition in Britain itself, so it makes sense that done well, it would.

A First Take On A NYT Story About Collapse Theory In Quantum Mechanics

In story in yesterday's New York Times talked about someone who is developing an approach to quantum mechanics called "objective collapse models" and is portrayed as a radical rebel fighting scientific orthodoxy.

There is a lot of local color and personal profiling in the story, but the scientific core of it is less radical or rebellious than the atmospherics in the story would suggest.

In quantum mechanics there are lots of phenomena in which something behaves like a spread out wave until it is observed, after which when observed, they behave like point-like objects with more specific properties. Quantum mechanics is rather vague about exactly what it is about a measurement that triggers this "collapse of the wave function".

Angelo Bassi's "objective collapse models" are an attempt to put more definition on what triggers the collapse of the wave function. He does not try to dispute parts of quantum mechanics that are well established experimentally, as so many others crackpot theorists (mostly not professional physicists), who just don't like the realities that quantum mechanics reveals, do.

Wikipedia has this to say in its introduction to its Objective Collapse Theory page:

Objective-collapse theories, also known as models of spontaneous wave function collapse or dynamical reduction models, were formulated as a response to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, to explain why and how quantum measurements always give definite outcomes, not a superposition of them as predicted by the Schrödinger equation, and more generally how the classical world emerges from quantum theory. The fundamental idea is that the unitary evolution of the wave function describing the state of a quantum system is approximate. It works well for microscopic systems, but progressively loses its validity when the mass / complexity of the system increases. 

In collapse theories, the Schrödinger equation is supplemented with additional nonlinear and stochastic terms (spontaneous collapses) which localize the wave function in space. The resulting dynamics is such that for microscopic isolated systems the new terms have a negligible effect; therefore, the usual quantum properties are recovered, apart from very tiny deviations. Such deviations can potentially be detected in dedicated experiments, and efforts are increasing worldwide towards testing them. 

An inbuilt amplification mechanism makes sure that for macroscopic systems consisting of many particles, the collapse becomes stronger than the quantum dynamics. Then their wave function is always well localized in space, so well localized that it behaves, for all practical purposes, like a point moving in space according to Newton’s laws.
In this sense, collapse models provide a unified description of microscopic and macroscopic systems, avoiding the conceptual problems associated to measurements in quantum theory. 

The most well-known examples of such theories are: 

* Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW) model 

* Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) model 

* Diósi–Penrose (DP) model 

Collapse theories stand in opposition to many-worlds interpretation theories, in that they hold that a process of wave function collapse curtails the branching of the wave function and removes unobserved behaviour.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice entry on Collapse Theories that puts Bassi's work in context. This entry explains that experimental tests of his proposals have been proposed, but the differences in the theoretically expected experimental outcomes between these models and the mainstream alternatives are so subtle, that it is hard to do an experiment that definitively distinguishes between them. We can, however, do experiments that are close to being good enough to see these distinctions, and improvements in instrumental technologies should make it possible to confirm or  rule out this class of theories in the medium term future.

Bassi is also part of the LHCb collaboration jointly publishing papers such as this one experimentally measuring one of the Standard Model's weak force related constants, which governs the probability of a b quark transitioning to a charm quark in a W boson mediated interaction.

Bassi's most recent preprint on this subject is this one (which was eventually published):

Collapse models implement a progressive loss of quantum coherence when the mass and the complexity of quantum systems increase. We will review such models and the current attempts to test their predicted loss of quantum coherence.

Matteo Carlesso, Angelo Bassi, "Current tests of collapse models: How far can we push the limits of quantum mechanics?" arXiv (January 27, 2020) published in Quantum Information and Measurement (QIM) V: Quantum Technologies; OSA Technical Digest (Optical Society of America, 2019), paper S1C.3

DOI: 10.1364/QIM.2019.S1C.3

Another paper exploring the line of research mentioned in the New York Times article is this September 25, 2019 preprint examining the question of whether there is a "minimum measurement time" for quantum phenomena. This paper references the "Continuous Spontaneous Localization" (CSL) model which is one of the objective collapse models that he works with in his research.

Xenon1T Didn't Discover Axions Or An Extraordinary Neutrino Magnetic Moment

The pre-print of a new paper by the XEON1T dark matter detection experiment (press release available here) didn't discovery anything cool and basically admits that in its abstract, which should have read as follows (emphasis added):

We report results from searches for new physics with low-energy electronic recoil data recorded with the XENON1T detector. With an exposure of 0.65 tonne-years and an unprecedentedly low background rate of 76±2stat events/(tonne×year×keV) between 1-30 keV. . . .  

The excess can . . .  be explained by β decays of tritium, which was initially not considered, at 3.2σ significance with a corresponding tritium concentration in xenon of (6.2±2.0)×10^−25 mol/mol. Such a trace amount can be neither confirmed nor excluded with current knowledge of production and reduction mechanisms. . . . 

This analysis also sets the most restrictive direct constraints to date on pseudoscalar and vector bosonic dark matter for most masses between 1 and 210 keV/c2.

The bottom chart in Figure 10 of the paper, below, shows the constraints mention in the last paragraph above:

The necessary level of contamination need to produce this effect with a substance that wasn't tightly screened for because it wasn't pertinent to the primary mission of the experiment to detect WIMP dark matter (which it didn't), is truly tiny. It is roughly one tritium atom (each of which has a mass of 3.016 atomic mass units) per 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 xenon atoms (each of which has a mass of 131.293 atomic mass units). So, it would take roughly a mere 26 tiny tritium atoms interspersed into each ten kilograms of xenon, to produce the effect observed. This is an irreducible background effect that means that this experimental result is meaningless for telling us about new physics.

What other background effects were accounted for?

But, somebody threw the following language into the abstract (with similar breathless language in the press release), which practically rules out the possibility of new physics in same breath that it announces it, which shouldn't have been more than either a footnote in the body text, or a pre-print by the one or two members of the collaboration who came up with these hypotheses, never to be published, because they don't pass the smell test.

An excess over known backgrounds is observed below 7 keV, rising towards lower energies and prominent between 2-3 keV. The solar axion model has a 3.5σ significance, and a three-dimensional 90% confidence surface is reported for axion couplings to electrons, photons, and nucleons. This surface is inscribed in the cuboid defined by g(ae)<3.7×10^−12, g(ae)g(effan)<4.6×10−18, and g(ae)g(aγ)<7.6×10^−22 GeV^−1, and excludes either g(ae)=0 or g(ae)g(aγ)=g(ae)g(effan)=0. 

The neutrino magnetic moment signal is similarly favored over background at 3.2σ and a confidence interval of μν∈(1.4,2.9)×10^−11μB (90% C.L.) is reported. 

Both results are in tension with stellar constraints.  

. . . The significances of the solar axion and neutrino magnetic moment hypotheses are decreased to 2.1σ and 0.9σ, respectively, if an unconstrained tritium component is included in the fitting.  

Both results contradict the Standard Model. 

The paper also fails to adjust for the "look elsewhere effect", and is engaged in something akin to p hacking.

One of the authors of the paper in a statement made to the New York Times clarifies:

“We want to be very clear that all we are reporting is observation of an excess (a fairly significant one) and not a discovery of any kind,” said Evan Shockley of the University of Chicago in an email.

This very public statement undermining the cymbal crash that is getting attention for this paper, and the self-contradictory language in the abstract and press release, strongly suggests that the 163 scientists in the collaboration were sharply divided over whether such a highly speculative and ill supported claim of new physics should be included in the abstract and press release accompanying the paper. Shockley is doing his best not to have his professional reputation tarnished by this paper by making this statement.

Can we test the most plausible "no new physics" hypothesis of tritium contamination?

No. Why not?

There might have been undetected traces of radioactive tritium (a version of hydrogen with two neutrons) in XENON1T, causing the surrounding liquid to sparkle. The XENON team worked hard to avoid this sort of noise from the beginning, Martens said. Still, he said, the tiny levels of tritium in question here would be impossible to perfectly screen out. And with XENON1T now taken apart to build a bigger future experiment, it’s impossible to go back and check. 

The tritium hypothesis fits the data to a confidence level of 3.2 sigma. Joey Neilsen, a physicist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, who is not involved in XENON, said that corresponds to about a 1 in 700 chance that random fluctuations would have produced the signal.

The half-life of tritium is 12.3 years. The experiment ran for roughly two years.

Are there other problems with the solar axion hypothesis?

Yes.

One telltale clue would suggest whether the solar axions hypothesis should be taken seriously: seasonal changes in the data, Yu said.  

“If the signal were indeed from solar axions, one would expect a modulation in the signal due to the relative position of the sun to the Earth,” she said.  

As our planet gets a bit more distant from the star it orbits, the solar axion stream should weaken. As Earth gets closer to the sun, Yu said, the signal should get stronger.  

Martens said that no seasonal variation is visible in the XENON1T signal. The signal is too faint, and the experiment ran too briefly at just two years, for XENON1T to have picked it up.

The argument that axions are "well motivated" is also overstated.

Axions are a hypothesis proposed to explain why the strong force doesn't have CP violation (i.e., to oversimplify, the strong force of the Standard Model, like the electromagnetic force, but unlike the weak force, has no arrow of time and treats particles and antiparticles with the same electric charge in the same way). 

But, the "strong CP problem" isn't a problem in any meaningful sense of the word, with anything but a preconceived notion about how Nature should have chosen its physical constants that it is not obliged to honor. 

Also, the lack of CP violation in the strong force already has a natural and reasonable explanation, which is that gluons which transmit the strong force are massless in the Standard Model. And, massless particles (the photon, the gluon and the hypothetical graviton) because they travel at the speed of light, don't experience time. But, since CP violation is equivalent to time direction violation (if CPT is perfectly conserved as there is every reason to believe it is), you wouldn't expect a particle that doesn't experience time to work differently going forward in time and going backward in time. 

Moreover, the axions needed to explain this experimental result does not have the properties of the axion needed to explain the "strong CP problem" if it was a problem. It would instead be a theoretical variation on the original axion concept with no real physical or mathematical motivation.

Jester (a.k.a. Adam Falkowski) at his Resonances blog is likewise unconvinced (emphasis added):

The XENON collaboration was operating a 1-ton xenon detector in an underground lab in Italy. Originally, this line of experiments was devised to search for hypothetical heavy particles constituting dark matter, so called WIMPs. For that they offer a basically background-free environment, where a signal of dark matter colliding with xenon nuclei would stand out like a lighthouse. However all WIMP searches so far have returned zero, null, and nada. 

Partly out of boredom and despair, the xenon-based collaborations began thinking out-of-the-box to find out what else their shiny instruments could be good for. One idea was to search for axions. These are hypothetical superlight and superweakly interacting particles, originally devised to plug a certain theoretical hole in the Standard Model of particle physics. If they exist, they should be copiously produced in the core of the Sun with energies of order a keV. This is too little to perceptibly knock an atomic nucleus, as xenon weighs over a hundred GeV. However, many variants of the axion scenario, in particular the popular DFSZ model, predicts axions interacting with electrons. Then a keV axion may occasionally hit the cloud of electrons orbiting xenon atoms, sending one to an excited level or ionizing the atom. These electron-recoil events can be identified principally by the ratio of ionization and scintillation signals, which is totally different than for WIMP-like nuclear recoils. This is no longer a background-free search, as radioactive isotopes present inside the detector may lead to the same signal. Therefore collaboration have to search for a peak of electron-recoil events at keV energies.

This is what they saw in the XENON1t data

Energy spectrum of electron-recoil events measured by the XENON1T experiment. 

The expected background is approximately flat from 30 keV down to the detection threshold at 1 keV, below which it falls off abruptly. On the other hand, the data seem to show a signal component growing towards low energies, and possibly peaking at 1-2 keV. Concentrating on the 1-7 keV range (so with a bit of cherry-picking), 285 events is observed in the data compared to an expected 232 events from the background-only fit. In purely statistical terms, this is a 3.5 sigma excess. . . . 

The peak of the excess corresponds to the temperature in the core of the Sun (15 million kelvin = 1.3 keV), so our star is a natural source of these particles (but at this point XENON cannot prove they arrive from the Sun). Furthermore, the particles must couple to electrons, because they can knock xenon's electrons off their orbits 

. . . For QCD axions the defining feature is their coupling to gluons, but in generic constructions one also finds the interaction between the axion and electrons. . . .

in the standard picture, the interactions of neutrinos with electrons are too weak to explain the excess. To that end one has to either increase their flux (so fiddle with the solar model), or to increase their interaction strength with matter (so go beyond the Standard Model). . . . 

How confident should we be that it's new physics? 

Experience has shown again and again that anomalies in new physics searches have, with a very large confidence, a mundane origin that does not involve exotic particles or interactions. In this case, possible explanations are, in order of likelihood, 1) small contamination of the detector, 2) some other instrumental effect that the collaboration hasn't thought of, 3) the ghost of Roberto Peccei, 4) a genuine signal of new physics. 

In fact, the collaboration itself is hedging for the first option, as they cannot exclude the presence of a small amount of tritium in the detector, which would produce a signal similar to the observed excess. Moreover, there are a few orange flags for the new physics interpretation:

1. Simplest models explaining the excess are excluded by astrophysical observations. If axions can be produced in the Sun at the rate suggested by the XENON result, they can be produced at even larger rates in hotter stars, e.g. in red giants or white dwarfs. This would lead to excessive cooling of these stars, in conflict with observations. The upper limit on the axion-electron coupling from red giants is 3*10^-13, which is an order of magnitude less than what is needed for the XENON excess. The neutrino magnetic moment explanations faces a similar difficulty. Of course, astrophysical limits reside in a different epistemological reality; it is not unheard of that they are relaxed by an order of magnitude or disappear completely. But certainly this is something to worry about.  

2. At a more psychological level, a small excess over a large background near a detection threshold.... sounds familiar. We've seen that before in the case of the DAMA and CoGeNT dark matter experiments, at it didn't turn out well.  

3. The bump is at 1.5 keV, which is *twice* 750 eV.  

So, as usual, more data, time, and patience is needed to verify the new physics hypothesis.

Roberto Peccei, whose ghost is mentioned, was the physicist at UCLA who first proposed the axion as a hypothetic particle to explain the lack of CP violation in the strong force back in 1977. He died on June 1, 2020 at age 78 of non-COVID related causes. It isn't implausible that the collaboration allowed the axion claim to be highlighted despite only marginal support for it in this experiment, to honor and call attention to his recent passing.

The third point about 750 eV is also a bit of an inside joke, referencing a 750 GeV diphoton excess of events noted in late 2015 and early 2016 that turned out to be nothing more than a statistical fluke after much undeserved hype.

Lubos Motl is more neutral in his assessment and provides additional links in a blog post on the topic at The Reference Frame, also provides a humanizing lede to the story:

This result has been known for a year or so. Grad students were tortured by the requirement of their silence. But the news got out today.

Quebec As A Natural Experiment

The National Geographic channel (which is included in the newly initiated Disney+ streaming service), has a new historical fiction TV drama series called "Barkskins" about the Filles du Roi (aka King's Daughters) who were sent to New France by King Louis XIV (who died in 1715 CE) to correct the gender imbalance in the colony. 

Mostly, they ended up in Quebec.

Quebec is a hot spot for international genetics research related to the multi-generational inheritance of genetic traits that can be benchmarked against theoretical models to test their reliability, as a long running natural experiment. 

This is because it has high quality and very complete birth, death and marriage records for about 400 years, with additional descriptive data because lots of people journaled or wrote vivid letters to family that were preserved, going all of the way back to this generation of men and women.

Also, there was not massive migration to or from Europe after this era, or to or from the rest of North America (except a pretty much one time, one directional migration to Louisiana), in part due to language barriers, since no new Francophone territories were left after the Louisiana Purchase in 1809. So, while this is certainly an oversimplification (as a comprehensive capsule history of Quebec from below the fold points out in detail) you still have a comparatively isolated gene pool pretty much until the 20th century, for a dozen generations or so after the women depicted in the new drama. And, because the habitable part of Quebec has essentially no natural geographic barriers and few strict endogamy inducing cultural divisions, Quebec can be studied as a first approximation of a single, unstructured, closed gene pool, which is what lots of widely used population genetic models try to approximate.

For example, in the case of many rare genes found among people in Quebec, it is possible to identify the names of specific named women from this founding population group, who we know something about beyond a mere tombstone information, who introduced the trait into the gene pool of Quebec.

This makes it possible, for instance, to quantify exactly the statistical impact of a gene on the fertility and mortality of those who carried it, and to precisely quantify mutation rates of genes present in the founding populations by looking at all descendants of that person who inherited either the original version or a mutated version of the original gene.

There are a few other places where that can be done (e.g. Iceland and Korea have 500+ year time series of accurate vital statistics records at the individual by individual level), that capture essentially a complete and isolated gene pool, but not many. In lots of other places that were keeping good written vital statistics records from the late 17th century or earlier, wars, fires and natural disasters destroyed the records at some point.

So you can use the example of Quebec to compare mathematically idealized multi-generational population genetic models with reality to see what factors differ enough from mathematical ideals (from the fact that there is no such thing as a fractional child in real life, to the fact that "panmixia" isn't a realistic assumption even in a very weakly structured population) that need to be included in a model that accurately describes reality.

Selected references from this body of the scientific literature and a detailed capsule history of Quebec from the body text of one of those articles, appear below the fold.

What Would Have Been Different If The Persians Had Defeated The Greeks? UPDATED

Feel free to discuss and consider this proposition in the comments. 

I will briefly comment that during a visit to Greece, and in particular, some tours in Athens last summer, the Greco-Persian War was vibrantly alive in the hearts and minds of the Greek people and still felt relevant today.

Of all the many counterfactuals, those “what-ifs” posed by history, perhaps the most arresting, if only because the most sweeping, asks: "what if the Persians had defeated the Greeks in the Greco-Persian War of 490–479 B.C.?" 

Had this happened, there might have been no Plato, no Aristotle, no Roman Empire, no Christianity, no Western Civilization. A Great King, a lineal descendant of Darius, might still rule the world. All might worship the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda, with men going about in turbans, women remaining at home or in harems. But that, as every counterfactual invariably ends—generally accompanied by a sigh of relief—didn’t happen.

From this book review reviewing Peter Green, Xerxes at Salamis (1970, reissued as The Greco-Persian Wars).

I'll also note that the answer is multi-faceted. 

One aspect of the question is a question of what matters in terms of historical causation.

If you are believer in the "Great Men" and "key moments" theory of history, events like this really can make an immense difference. 

But, if you think that history is largely a function of big, long term fundamental forces like climate and technology and inevitable secular trends (an approach often associated with Marxist historical interpretation but by not means so ideologically bound), you may be inclined to say that if the Persians had defeated the Greeks in the Greco-Persian War of 490–479 B.C., the fortunes of the parties probably would have been reversed in a second Greco-Persian War of 453-444 B.C., without leaving the world notable changed in the long run.

In this view, "Great Men" may change the finer grained details of history, but only rarely the overarching long term trends that matter in the long run. The alternative history would surely be different in some respects, because history does not repeat itself, but it would rhyme with the world we live in, taming our utopian and dystopian instincts.

In the language of mathematics, historical causation is a "chaotic" process, i.e. one in which small changes in the conditions in one moment are capable of producing big differences in outcome down the line due to the non-linear processes involved in how events unfold. But, historical trajectories have an "attractor" to which the non-linear processes' developments tend to gravitate, although the strength of these attractors is not a matter upon which there is a strong consensus, even when it is possible to meaningful define or describe that strength with more than a mere gut feeling. 

Even then, however, a question like this opens up the question of what is really fundamental, and what is window dressing.

An absence of Plato and Aristotle does not imply that the Persian tradition might have offered us equally formidable philosophers and proto-scientists. Cf. Hindu philosophy was mathematical. Indeed, some non-Western figures readily present themselves as alternatives. 

We might not have "Western Civilization" but that is not to say that Persian civilization under the different conditions it would have encountered in the scenario suggested would have been all that different in the ways that matter. Surely, an ascendant global Persian civilization would have still been more similar to our "Western Civilization" than the civilizations of India, China, Japan, the expansionist Bantu tribes of Africa, or the Aztecs.

A Persian Empire, had it extended to Hadrian's Wall, would probably have turned out more similar to the Roman Empire than the Persian Empire of our history books, but it would surely also have been quite distinct in myriad particulars. The notion that "A Great King, a lineal descendant of Darius, might still rule the world", likewise, seems about as plausible as the notion that because the Greeks won, a Roman Emperor still rules the world.

The Roman Empire with late Iron Age technology, was not sufficient robust to survive to the modern day, and neither would a Persian Empire.

Arguably, the therapeutic deism of the typical layman with little training in religious doctrine, who is nominally Christian, is actually closer, doctrinally, to Zoroastrianism than to Christianity or Judaism understood at the level of the doctrines that matter to educated elites.

It could be that 19th century businessmen might have ended up wearing turbans rather than bowler hats or beaver caps and silk neckties, if this had come to pass. But, anyone who thinks that fashion has much intrinsic value vastly overestimates the importance of function over form.

And, the suggestion that in world where the Persians rather than the Greeks prevailed that we would have women remaining at home or in harems, misapprehends the extent to which women's roles are functions of economics more than culture. 

King Solomon is a household name to every small town Christian and Jew in America, and he generally has a very high favorability rating. But, that doesn't mean that modern Americans maintain vast harems in order to follow his allegedly wise example. And, women remained at home to a much greater extent than they do today as recently as the 1950s and early 1960s Baby Boom in the United States.

IMPORTANT UPDATE (July 6, 2020):

One noteworthy aspect of Zoroastrianism is that, in contrast to other ancient religions (including Judaism, and later, Christianity), Zoroastrianism appears to have banned slavery on spiritual grounds. This is important to bear in mind in the context of discussing the Persian War, below. The Greeks thought of the war as the defense of their glorious traditions, including the political participation of citizens in the state, but it was the Greeks who controlled a society that was heavily dependent on slavery, whereas slavery was at least less prevalent in Persia than in Greece (despite the religious ban, slavery was clearly still present in the Persian Empire to some degree).

From here.

Where Did Vedic Culture Come From?

This is a fascinating hypothesis that doesn't seem immediately implausible, although without downloading it onto a Kindle (at about 10% of the cost of the hard cover edition) and reading it, I'm not in a good position to evaluate how solid its arguments are and how well they are supported by the evidence. If anyone has access to a more in depth review or journal articles by the same author on this topic, I'd love to see them.

UPDATE of February 14-15, 2019

Razib mentions the book and recommends it (with a grain of salt) here. A longer discussion of the book can be found here. The longer discussion contains this statement which makes me quite skeptical of the discussion:

The primary difficulty of discussing the ancient history of India lies in the necessity of first demolishing several well-established inaccuracies, such as the Aryan Invasion Theory, for instance. Spun by white men and broadcast by colonial historians, this old wives’ tale is still taught in schools and colleges, with half of any written work – measured in terms of paper, ink and effort - being expended on it. We shall not entertain it.

Shifting geography

Either Kochhar or the author of the discussion (it isn't entirely clear to whom this analysis should be credited based upon the way the piece is written), makes a textual case that two different parts of the epic, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata involve two different places, contrary to conventional wisdom: the Mahabharata near the modern Ganges River of India is described in the later epic texts, and the Ramayana somewhere else that was the location which the earlier Rig Vedic texts describe.

Soma

Kochhar argues that ephedra is the "soma" of the Rig Vedas (a popular, but not unanimous view see also here; some scholars argue that it is another plant, while others argue that it was a mixture of ephedra and another plant) that points to a central Asian place of composition because that is where that plant, which does not grow in India, is found. Instead, it is found  found in Afghanistan, Iran, the northern Himalayas, and the Hindu Kush.

Latitude

This little tidbit of evidence is intriguing (emphasis added):

There are 49 cosmic hymns in the Rig and the Yajur Vedas whose meanings have not been explained. But one particular hymn from Vedanga Jyotish informs us that the longest day of the year, or summer solstice, comprised 18 periods of daylight and 12 of night. Day and night are of equal length on the Equator; in the higher latitudes, summer days are longer than nights. 

The latitude at which the proportion of daylight and darkness is 3:2 is 34 degrees North. It is worth noting that the cities to be found around this latitude today are Herat and Kabul in Afghanistan. In other words, the place and time of the composition of the Vedanga Jyotish is the same as that of Vedic Afghanistan and Iran. This second piece of evidence offered by Rajesh Kochhar further strengthens the perception of the location and time of the Rig Veda.

Rivers

Based upon textual information and geography Kochhar identifies the Sarayu river of the epics with:

the 650-km river known as the Hari-Rud in Afghanistan, whose source is in the Hindu Kush mountains. It flows past the city of Herat and then for 100 km along the Iran-Afghanistan border before disappearing in the Karakom desert of Central Asia.

Kochhar identifies another major river of the epics, the Sarasvati river, with a different river than the Ghaggar-Hakra River in India proper that it is often claimed to be:

In the Avesta we find the Saraswati as the Harahaiti – the similarity in sound is noticeable – which enters Iran along the combined basin of the river Arghandar on the Afghan-Iran border and the river Helmand. According to Kochhar, it is this Helmand that is the Vedic Saraswati river.

The source of the Helmand is in the Koh-i-Baba mountain range. Flowing for 1,300 miles through the heart of Afghanistan, the Vedic Saraswati joins the Vedic Drijadbati or Arghandar. The Avesta identifies this wide river as the Hetumanta (or, in varations, as Setumanta). In Iran the Saraswati is named the Harahaiti, which flows into the inland lake Hamun-e-Sabari in the Saistan area of northern Iran. 

Wikipedia further elaborates Kochhar's position on this issue which is actually a bit more complex than the discussion I linked to suggested (emphasis added):

Rajesh Kocchar, after a detailed analysis of the Vedic texts and geological environments of the rivers, concludes that there are two Sarasvati rivers mentioned in the Rigveda. The early Rigvedic Sarasvati, which he calls Naditama Sarasvati, is described in suktas 2.41, 7.36 etc. of the family books of the Rigveda, and drains into a samudra. The description of the Naditama Sarasvati in the Rigveda matches the physical features of the Helmand Riverin Afghanistan, more precisely its tributary the Harut River, whose older name was Haraxvatī in Avestan. 

The later Rigvedic Sarasvati, which he calls Vinasana Sarasvati, is described in the Rigvedic Nadistuti sukta (10.75), which was composed centuries later, after an eastward migration of the bearers of the Rigvedic culture to the western Gangetic plain some 600 km to the east. The Sarasvati by this time had become a mythical "disappeared" river, and the name was transferred to the Ghaggar which disappeared in the desert. The later Rigvedic Sarasvati is only in the post-Rig Vedic Brahmanas said to disappear in the sands. According to Kocchar the Ganga and Yamuna were small streams in the vicinity of the Harut River. When the Vedic people moved east into Punjab, they named the new rivers they encountered after the old rivers they knew from Helmand, and the Vinasana Sarasvati may correspond with the Ghaggar-Hakra river. 

END UPDATE

In The Vedic People, well-known astro-physicist Rajesh Kochhar provides answers to some quintessential questions of ancient Indian history. Drawing upon and synthesizing data from a wide variety of fields — linguistics and literature, natural history, archaeology, history of technology, geomorphology and astronomy — Kochhar presents a bold hypotheses by which he seeks to resolve several paradoxes that have plagued the professional historian and archaeologist alike. . . .

This book argues that a major part of the Rgveda was composed in south Afghanistan (after c.1700 BC) before the Rgvedic people entered the Punjab plain and well before they moved east of the Ganga River. The author asserts that during their migrations the Indo-Aryans not only carried with them their rituals and hymns but also place and river names which they selectively reused.

Via Amazon (Hat tip Razib Khan's Twitter feed).