Alexey Petrov, a particle theorist at Wayne State University, has a blog worth following called Symmetry Factor. He has news about the 2008 budget request for HEP at the DOE, which according to him includes a 12.7% increase in the final 2007 number and a 3.7% increase for 2008 above that (not sure where his numbers come from). This would be a very healthy increase over these two years. Research in the physical sciences has become a big priority for the Bush administration for some reason, it’s a major part of the “American Competitiveness Initiative”. The NSF is also seeing a large increase in its FY2008 request: 8.7%. For various news stories about this, see here, here, here and here. Still unclear what will happen to this budget request in Congress where the Democratic majority will be in control. They have been sympathetic to science research spending in the past, but may or may not want to go along with the emphasis on the physical sciences embodied in this request. Then there’s the small matter of the huge US government deficits to consider. Somebody, someday might decide to try and do something about them.
Maybe I’ve been a bit unfair in the past to the Templeton Foundation, which recently issued this statement.
The IAS held a workshop last month on Homological Mirror Symmetry, notes are available here. Next month there will be a part two, which will mainly concentrate on Geometric Langlands. The schedule is here.
Via Jonathan Shock, the news that particle physicist Nick Evans has written a particle physics murder mystery entitled The Newtonian Legacy, and is making it available on-line for free. I’ll definitely be reading it soon.
Last evening I gave a talk here in New York downtown at the Cafe Scientifique. I think the talk went quite well: the place was packed, the audience attentive and asked quite a few good questions. Up next month is Glennys Farrar of NYU, who will be talking about dark matter. This event is pretty new, organized largely by Stefanie Glick who just got it started last fall. Also in New York are two other similar monthly science events: Secret Science Club, organized by Dorian Devins at Union Hall in Brooklyn (Janna Levin will be there tonight), and Columbia’s Cafe Science, which features Columbia faculty members (my colleague John Morgan will be speaking with Sylvia Nasar next week).
Hi Peter,
I don’t think you have been so unfair to the Templeton foudation in the past. In my experience most seriously religious people may accept certain scientific facts on the surface, but have a very unscientific point of view at their core. I have even heard more compromising religous types talk about how God guides evolution, that the Big Bang was a conscious act of Creation, etc. I don’t want to be nasty or contemptuous of people who want to experience religion in some
way through science, but to start putting the Big Kahuna(s) in the middle of scientific facts is wrongheaded at best, dumb at worst. To an atheist like me (most scientists as well, I think), this seems to be lot of excess baggage.
Now I’ll probably get email threatening my death by cancer.
Dear Peter,
Thank you for referencing my blog! My numbers regarding the budget increase are from the Under Secretary Orbach’s presentation of the 2008 budget request, see footnote on page 4. The pdf file of this presentation is here: http://www.science.doe.gov/Budget_and_Planning/Budget_Rollouts/DrOrbach-FY2008-SCBudgetRollout-Feb05-stakeholders.pdf
Regards,
–Alexey.
DEAR PROFESOR WOIT,
PLEASE DO NOT ENDORSE SYLVIA NAZAR. SHE HAS SOILED THE REPUTATION OF THE ENTIRE MATHEMATICS WORLD WITH HER UPSIDE DOWN ARTICLES ABOUT SHING TUNG YAU.
ALSO (ABOUT THE MIRROR SIMMETRY) I KNOW ABOUT THE SYZ CONJECTURES BECAUSE THEY ARE JUST ABOUT SPECIAL LAGRANGE MANIFOLDS, BUT WHERE SHOULD I LEARN ABOUT TRIANGLED AND DERIVED CATEGORIES TO LEARN HOMOLOGICAL MIRROR SIMMETRY? AND WHERE CAN I LEARN WHAT IS A STACK AND WHY I NEED IT IN GEOMETRICAL LANGLANDS PROGRAMS?
AND HAS EDWARD WITTEN AND ANTONY KAPUSTIN AND SERGAY GUKOV ACTUALLY DONE NEW MATHEMATICS ABOUT GEOMETRIC LANGLANDS OR IS IT JUST TALKING ABOUT IT IN THE LANGUAGE OF STRING THEORY
QWERTY,
I’m not endorsing anyone, please don’t engage here in pro or anti Yau diatribes, I want nothing to do with that and will delete any further comments of this kind.
Derived categories are what you get when you generalize homological algebra to consider not just the homology groups of complexes, but complexes up to homotopy. For an introduction, see
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/math.AG/0001045
Stacks are useful whenever you want to work with objects with symmetries. Instead of thinking about the points of the space, you think about the category whose objects are points, morphisms symmetries. There’s a collaboration underway to write a new textbook on the subject, with preliminary versions of some chapters here
http://www.math.unizh.ch/index.php?pr_vo_det&key1=1287&key2=580&no_cache=1
You might try reading the introductory chapter.
I don’t know geometric Langlands well enough to know whether the Witten/Kapustin/Gukov work provides mathematical insights that the mathematicians working on this were not already aware of. The recent work of Witten and Gukov does seem to correspond to topics that mathematicians in this area are actively working on. I hope to make it down to the IAS in March to learn more about this.
I’ve never been able to completely uncover the true underlying motivations of Templeton, but Paul Davies is a publicly professed atheist who was forced to accept the Templeton prize only because they fund research into strong interpretations of the anthropic principle, and somehow, I just don’t see the Discovery Institute doing this. Davies and others are forced to take money from them because nobody else will fund research into the most apparent implications of the observed universe, so I’d imagine that he’d tell people to get their dogmatic anticentrist priorities straight, or get over it, because they’re unfounded belief system is no better than the idists.
I know for a fact that “leading” IDists, including Bill Dembski, do not like, nor do they support the position of the Templeton Foundation, so Templton certainly does not fit the profile of your standard fanatical ID proponents who would abuse science in order to force religion into the high school curriculum. Other than that, this isn’t high school, children, so if a person wearing a cross around their chest is also holding science in their hand, then you should get over it and listen to them, because your otherwise unfounded paranoia will destroy ya…
Perhaps? … 😉