{"id":2286,"date":"2009-09-16T18:02:46","date_gmt":"2009-09-16T23:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2286"},"modified":"2009-09-16T18:02:46","modified_gmt":"2009-09-16T23:02:46","slug":"various-and-sundry-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2286","title":{"rendered":"Various and Sundry"},"content":{"rendered":"
  • General Relativity and Gravitation has a special issue on quantum gravity, available here<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  • Some out-takes from photographs taken for the recent Forbes article are here<\/a>. You can see what part of my office looks like…<\/li>\n
  • I haven’t regularly been following the TV show Big Bang Theory<\/em>, which features a main character (Sheldon) inspired by Lubos Motl. Someone who has is Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, who is interviewed here<\/a>, with the following exchange:
    \n

    Alan: My geek barometer question for the Big Bang Theory is, Do you ever pause it and look at the board and try to decipher the equations?<\/p>\n

    PP: I don\u2019t need to pause it, just a quick glance. Actually, it\u2019s all really advanced stuff, like string theory and more. Actually I don\u2019t think it\u2019s string theory because Sheldon said some nasty things about string theory in the past. But I never really understand it. There\u2019s some other things that they\u2019ve got in there that I recognize.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    I assume Phil is just confused, but if things have gotten to the point that Sheldon is saying nasty things about string theory, it’s really in trouble…<\/li>\n

  • Physics World has two interesting interviews by Matin Durrani on-line, one with CERN Director General Rolf Heuer<\/a>, the other with CERN head of communications James Gillies<\/a>.\n

    One topic discussed by Heuer is CLIC, and CERN’s hope to be the place where the next generation electron-positron collider gets built. Here’s a recent presentation<\/a> about CLIC’s status. If one were the wildly optimistic sort, one could see R and D on this finished next year, a complete design by 2016, construction starting in 2018 and first beam in 2025.<\/li>\n

  • Even further down the road than CLIC would be a muon collider. Fermilab now has a web-site<\/a> devoted to the topic.<\/li>\n
  • You might want to keep up with the activities of the Bogdanovs here<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  • John Hagelin’s Global Financial Capital of New York<\/a> (or someone they sold to recently) seems to be selling<\/a> its building, which includes 3 stories configured as luxury apartments. $45,000,000 and it’s all yours. For some more of Hagelin’s activities over the last few years, there’s this<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n
  • The New York Times Book Review has a nice review<\/a> of the recent biography of Dirac I wrote about here<\/a>, which is now out in the US.<\/li>\n
  • If, unlike Dirac, you prefer your spinors real, there’s a very interesting review article in Nature by Frank Wilczek, entitled Majorana Returns<\/a>. I hadn’t realized that these things now seem to be finding a place in condensed matter physics and even quantum information processing.\n<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    General Relativity and Gravitation has a special issue on quantum gravity, available here. Some out-takes from photographs taken for the recent Forbes article are here. You can see what part of my office looks like… I haven’t regularly been following … Continue reading →<\/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_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2286","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\/2286","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=2286"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2298,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions\/2298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}