{"id":17,"date":"2004-04-26T14:07:39","date_gmt":"2004-04-26T18:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=17"},"modified":"2004-04-26T14:07:39","modified_gmt":"2004-04-26T18:07:39","slug":"the-good-old-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"The Good Old Days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Alvaro de Rujula has posted on the arXiv under the title &#8220;<A href=\"http:\/\/www.arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-ph\/0404215\">Fifty years of Yang-Mills Theories: a phenomenological point of view<\/A>&#8221; some of his recollections from the mid-seventies.  These bring back my own memories of taking a course on particle theory from him at Harvard around 1977-78.  One amusing aspect of the course was that when introducing a concept carrying someone&#8217;s name, de Rujula would always say something like &#8220;this is the so-called Weinberg angle, which of course was discovered by Glashow&#8221;.  In one lecture he did something a bit different, saying something like &#8220;this is the Cabibbo angle, which, strangely enough, I think actually may have been discovered by Cabibbo&#8221;.   de Rujula&#8217;s paper contains one of his famous drawings from the period and an amusing picture of Georgi and Glashow arguing.  His asides are entertaining, but some so obscure I confess to not knowing exactly what he is referring to.<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;s arXiv postings also contain a <A href=\"http:\/\/www.arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-th\/0404188\" >review talk<\/A> on the state of string theory.  It discusses the &#8220;landscape&#8221;  with the comment &#8220;However, with such large numbers of vacua involved, one must wonder whether the scheme is at all testable, even in principle.&#8221;   Normally string theory reviews start by describing the theory as the &#8220;only known&#8221; or &#8220;best candidate&#8221; or &#8220;most promising&#8221; approach to unification.  This one replaces those phrases by &#8220;dominant framework&#8221;, and one certainly can&#8217;t argue with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alvaro de Rujula has posted on the arXiv under the title &#8220;Fifty years of Yang-Mills Theories: a phenomenological point of view&#8221; some of his recollections from the mid-seventies. These bring back my own memories of taking a course on particle &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=17\">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_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","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\/17","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=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}