{"id":135,"date":"2005-01-13T14:50:31","date_gmt":"2005-01-13T18:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=135"},"modified":"2005-01-13T14:50:31","modified_gmt":"2005-01-13T18:50:31","slug":"quantum-diaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=135","title":{"rendered":"Quantum Diaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The world of particle physics web logging expanded by about an order of magnitude today, as a new web-site called <A href=\"http:\/\/interactions.org\/quantumdiaries\/index.html\">Quantum Diaries<\/A> came on-line.  The idea seems to be to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein&#8217;s remarkable 1905 papers by getting 25 physicists from around the world to set up web logs so people can follow what they do during 2005.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the participants are experimentalists, with just three theorists as far as I can tell.  The theorists are <A href=\"http:\/\/interactions.org\/quantumdiaries\/bios\/john_ellis.html\">John Ellis<\/A> of CERN (see <A href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/blog\/archives\/000124.html\">here<\/A> for a story about him), <A href=\"http:\/\/interactions.org\/quantumdiaries\/bios\/stephon_alexander.html\">Stephon Alexander<\/A> of SLAC, and <A href=\"http:\/\/interactions.org\/quantumdiaries\/bios\/jochen_weller.html\">Jochen Weller<\/A> of Fermilab.<\/p>\n<p>Interestingly, all three of the theorists are spending at least part of their time working on cosmological or astrophysical topics, which gives you some idea of where the field is headed. Also, none of them are working on string theory at the moment, which also gives you some idea of where the field is headed.<\/p>\n<p>As a completely unrelated aside, today I came upon the web-site of <A href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.buffalo.edu\/~bapowell\">Brian Powell<\/A>, a graduate student of Will Kinney&#8217;s at Buffalo studying cosmology.  He&#8217;s more pro than anti string theory, but irreverently funny. His comment that &#8220;many people criticize string theory because it&#8217;s sort of becoming fashionable to do so&#8221; warmed my heart.  On the other hand, the fact that he links to something I wrote about Witten&#8217;s talk at Santa Barbara with the terms &#8220;Witten gets socked in the groin&#8221; kind of upsets me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The world of particle physics web logging expanded by about an order of magnitude today, as a new web-site called Quantum Diaries came on-line. The idea seems to be to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein&#8217;s remarkable 1905 papers by &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=135\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","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\/135","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=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}