{"id":12529,"date":"2021-10-15T12:05:06","date_gmt":"2021-10-15T16:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12529"},"modified":"2021-10-15T12:22:29","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T16:22:29","slug":"news-and-travels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12529","title":{"rendered":"News and Travels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First some personally relevant items:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I finally have a finished <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/twistorunification\/euclidean-twistor-unification.pdf\">version 2.0 of my euclidean twistor unification paper<\/a> (discussed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12479\">here<\/a>), it&#8217;s uploaded to the arXiv, should appear <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2104.05099\">there<\/a> Monday.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ll be giving a talk October 30th at the <a href=\"https:\/\/foundations2020.sciencesconf.org\/\">Foundations 2021 conference in Paris<\/a>, something about the unity of math and physics, and will take the opportunity to spend about two weeks in Europe, mostly in Paris.<\/li>\n<li>In other travels, I&#8217;ll be in the Bay area for a week or so mid-November.<\/li>\n<li>For entertainment I tried out a WordPress plugin that dumps all my blog content into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/NEWblog-full.pdf\">a single pdf<\/a>.  If you want 8,518 pages to read at your leisure when you&#8217;re not connected to the internet, this would be one way to spend your time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In math and physics news, there&#8217;s:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>David Mumford has a had a remarkable career, first as an algebraic geometer (he won a Fields Medal for his work in this area) and later in the field of computer vision.  He&#8217;s also known as a talented expositor, with his books and papers the standard references for several different topics.  He&#8217;s moved into physics this month, with a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ams.org\/journals\/notices\/202110\/rnoti-p1715.pdf\">wonderful article about cosmology<\/a> in the Notices.  His <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dam.brown.edu\/people\/mumford\/blog.html\">blog<\/a> is well-worth following, it had the cosmology piece a few months back.<\/li>\n<li>Also in the Notices is a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ams.org\/journals\/notices\/202110\/rnoti-p1763.pdf\">set of memorial articles about Lucien Szpiro<\/a>, who passed away last year. I wrote a little bit about him <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11717\">here<\/a>, am very pleased to see these articles which give a detailed picture of both the person and his mathematics.<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"https:\/\/scgcs.berkeley.edu\/\">Simons Collaboration on Global Categorical Symmetries<\/a> had its <a href=\"https:\/\/scgcs.berkeley.edu\/gcs-kick-off-meeting\/\">kick-off meeting<\/a> this week in Stony Brook, videos available <a href=\"http:\/\/scgp.stonybrook.edu\/video_portal\/results.php?event_id=365\">here<\/a>.  There are many interesting talks to watch.  I got very excited for a minute (around :05:00 in <a href=\"http:\/\/scgp.stonybrook.edu\/video_portal\/video.php?id=4970\">this video<\/a>) when Greg Moore started talking about some of my favorite questions (e.g. what is the representation theory of gauge groups in dimension greater than one?).  But then I realized he had labeled these &#8220;Traditional Questions&#8221;, in Fraktur font to emphasize how old and out of date they were.  He described these as &#8220;old-fashioned questions&#8221;, that people were not seriously working on anymore.  As he explained, you&#8217;re no longer supposed to be thinking about a fixed topology, but looking for something more general that treats all topologies.  My problem with this is that one tends to get interesting results about topology this way, but the physics applications seem to be in condensed matter physics, with little relevance to questions about local fundamental physics that have always been my main interest.<\/li>\n<li>I really don&#8217;t understand the thinking in physics theses days at all.  Nima Arkani-Hamed is a remarkable theorist who came up with a lot of highly speculative ideas about particle physics that have never worked out, then moved on to brilliant work leading efforts that have transformed the study of scattering amplitudes.  The APS <a href=\"https:\/\/aps.org\/programs\/honors\/prizes\/prizerecipient.cfm?last_nm=Arkani-Hamed&#038;first_nm=Nima&#038;year=2022\">just announced<\/a> that he&#8217;s getting the 2022 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, for &#8220;the development of transformative new frameworks&#8221;.  These &#8220;transformative new frameworks&#8221; are listed as &#8220;work on large extra dimensions, the Little Higgs, and more generally for new ideas connected to the origin of the electroweak scale&#8221;, none of which has had any success, while the amplitudes work is ignored.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First some personally relevant items: I finally have a finished version 2.0 of my euclidean twistor unification paper (discussed here), it&#8217;s uploaded to the arXiv, should appear there Monday. I&#8217;ll be giving a talk October 30th at the Foundations 2021 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12529\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12529"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12537,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12529\/revisions\/12537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}