Comments on: Fortress of Solitude

By: Supersymmetry Closer To Home | Cosmic Variance

Supersymmetry Closer To Home | Cosmic Variance — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 23:40:40 +0000

[...] It’s great to go to these conferences to hear about the growing buzz of excitement about what might happen in the upcoming major experiment in the field, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, see here and here), about which you’ve read a lot from previous posts (do a search on “LHC”). There’s a feeling that there’s a chance for there to be wonderful physics “just around the corner”, and that’s a good place to be in terms of morale. The SUSY conferences have a very nice mix of theory, experiment and phenomenology -and crucially the practitioners thereof- and this makes them worthwhile attending. I was lucky last year to be on my annual visit to Durham when SUSY05 was going on, and I’m lucky again this year for SUSY06 since Irvine is just “down the road” from Los Angeles. [...]

By: Geometry, CFT, and Strings! Oh My! | Cosmic Variance

Geometry, CFT, and Strings! Oh My! | Cosmic Variance — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 11:01:40 +0000

[...] Can I do a two line post? It’s hard for me. I must practice. See reports by Paul Cook on the LMS workshop I mentioned here. -cvj [...]

By: Do Phenomenologists Sing and Dance Better Than String Theorists? | Cosmic Variance

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 15:43:05 +0000

[...] Well, the good times continue. Last night, the participants of SUSY 2005, which is taking place in Durham (see some remarks in an earlier post) showed that they can holler and shake their collective booty too. At a barbecue in the sunny long evening, we saw a performance of the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP)’s own Ceilidh band, (pronounced “Kaylee”), comprised of several physicists, their spouses and offspring, (see here for a list and more info) and joined by special guest and physicist Howie Haber on guitar, and led and smoothly MC’ed by the Institute’s director James Stirling (also on guitar). [...]

By: Ijon Tichy

Ijon Tichy — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 17:11:40 +0000

Thanks for the informative reply. Gravity is such an unaccomodating beast!

By: Clifford

Clifford — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 15:41:01 +0000

Good Question. Thanks for asking. I missed the second day, as I was working with my student James the whole day, so cannot tell you about the content of the talks on that day, and there was disruption due to the events in London, so not all speakers made it. See the schedule (I gave a link) of the conference for the people and titles. That’s where the experimental work was mentioned. On the first day, the morning had a mixture of various Quantum Gravity approaches. There was no overall theme. What struck me about those was that it was not obvious exactly where hbar makes an appearance, but that might have been my failing and not the speakers’. For example, Fay’s Causal Sets approach seemed interesting and she spent some time describing how to replace a smooth spacetime with lists of data corresponding to a set of points and the causal structure connecting them. She needed then to demonstrate that the procedure gives you Lorentz invariance in some appropriate sense. I got confused about that because her description did not seem to be a demonstration, but she was short of time (’cos some jerk kept asking questions, perhaps?). However she did assure us that there was a theorem to take care of it. I could not see how her approach was informed by recent lessons in holography, as she kept insisting on preserving such “fundamental” structures as the volume of a patch of spacetime but she did not seem (rightly or wrongly) to care about holography. Nobody else (including the string theorists) in the audience seemed to either so at that point I rightly shut up. My confusion about hbar. Does it arise in the construction of the dynamics on the causal sets? A path integral whcih sums over them? What? She ran out of time. Fay’s pretty smart and has been doing this for a while so I’m sure she’s thought about it. I did not understand a number of the other talks like the spin foam material (largely because I was very confused about what they were calling observables…they seemed very metric dependent to me…I thought we were only allowed things like Wilson Loops). On the “stringy” side, there were an awful lot of talks on various braneworld scenarios. This is all well and good, and there’s good materiel there (Charmoussis, Padilla, etc), but most of the gravity parts of those talks are definitely more classical than Brahms. So I was very annoyed to have missed Ian Moss’s talk since his title said he was talking precisely about the quantum effects in braneworld scenarios. His talks are always interesting. Bernard Kay gave an excellent review of techniques for doing QFT in curved space. Panagiota Kanti talked about accelerator signatures of black holes if the true scale (due to brane world scenarios) of gravity is of order a TeV. That is fun stuff, but I found myself very worried about the assumptions that go into the various stages of decay of the holes depending upon how much angular momentum they have. But it’s early days for this sort of computation still. JoAnne is talking about that sort of thing today in one of her talks in SUSY 2005. -cvj

By: Ijon Tichy

Ijon Tichy — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:57:41 +0000

The sociology was interesting, but what about the scientific content of the â€œQuantum Gravity: Theory and Experimentâ€ meeting? I’m particularly interested in promising proposals to experimentally probe the Planck scale. As you well know, the development of quantum mechanics and relativity went hand in hand with numerous experiments exploring the domains of these theories. I suppose it’s not controversial to believe that theorists can’t get very far without real world data guiding them.