{"id":3158,"date":"2010-09-17T13:53:59","date_gmt":"2010-09-17T17:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3158"},"modified":"2019-03-15T15:10:22","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T19:10:22","slug":"short-items-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3158","title":{"rendered":"Short Items"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
  • The Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee recently recommended<\/a> that the Tevatron be kept running for an additional three years (until 2014). By the end of that time it should be able to accumulate a total of 20 fb-1<\/sup> of data, which would give sensitivity to a standard model Higgs at the 3-sigma level over the entire interesting mass range. The cost for this would be a total of about \\$150 million, which would likely have to come out of Fermilab’s $810 million\/year budget. While the idea of continuing to do physics at the high-energy frontier and possibly beat the LHC to the Higgs, for less than 10% of the lab budget\/year seems to be a no-brainer, director Oddone still may not be completely sold on the idea. Keeping the Tevatron going would set back some of the projects the lab has planned for its future in a post-Tevatron world. There’s also significant concern about the future federal budget situation, and how to make sure that the best possible case is made for a future of Fermilab, in an environment where people may be looking for large, expensive programs that could be cut. For more about this, see Adrian Cho’s article Higgs or Bust?<\/a> in Science.\n

    One huge consideration in this decision is that of what will happen at the LHC. CERN is facing its own budgetary problems, and has just decided to shut down during 2012 not just the LHC (for repair of magnet interconnections), but the entire accelerator complex. Work continues this year on trying to raise the luminosity of the machine, but progress is slow. They still are an order of magnitude lower than where they want to be by the end of the year, with only a few more weeks left before the machine is shutdown as a proton-proton collider and reconfigured for a heavy-ion run. If all goes according to plan, by late 2011 the LHC would have 1 fb-1<\/sup> of data, enough to compete with the Tevatron in the Higgs search. But, so far, plans like this have turned out to be overly optimistic, with things taking longer than expected. <\/p>\n

    In today’s CERN Bulletin and Fermilab today, Oddone and CERN DG Heuer issued a joint statement downplaying the competition between their labs:<\/p>\n

    The press makes much of the competition between CERN\u2019s LHC and Fermilab\u2019s Tevatron in the search for the Higgs boson. This competitive aspect is real, and probably adds spice to the scientific exploration, but for us such reporting often feels like spilling the entire pepper shaker over a fine meal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n

  • CheapUniverses.com is now selling a Universe Splitter<\/a> iPhone app for $1.99, complementing its other products<\/a>. At $3.95, the Basic Universe:
    \n

    Using quantum physics, we split your universe into two branches, then we send you an email to inform you which branch you’re in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    As celebrity endorser, they have Garrett Lisi explaining:<\/p>\n

    The functioning of this app is in complete agreement with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n

  • The author is always the last to know such things, but I’ve heard rumors that someone intends to bring out a Czech edition of Not Even Wrong.<\/li>\n
  • High quality videos of talks from the Princeton IAS summer school on supersymmetry are available here<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  • In Langlands-related news, there’s an excellent new preprint by David Nadler<\/a> about the fundamental lemma and Ngo’s proof. This is one of the most ferociously difficult topics to understand in current math research, and Nadler’s article is about the best expository piece on the subject that I’ve seen.\n

    This semester there’s a program on Langlands Duality in Representation Theory and Gauge Theory<\/a> at Hebrew University.<\/p>\n

    There’s a fascinating recent preprint by Kevin Buzzard and Toby Gee on The conjectural connections between automorphic representations and Galois representations<\/a>. They conjecture a reciprocity sort of relation between algebraic automorphic representations and Galois representations, not just for GL(n), but for arbitrary reductive groups. This involves invoking a twist by “half the sum of the positive roots”, a phenomenon that arises in various places in representation theory, often indictating that spinors are involved (“half the sum of the positive roots” is the highest weight of the spinor representation).<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee recently recommended that the Tevatron be kept running for an additional three years (until 2014). By the end of that time it should be able to accumulate a total of 20 fb-1 of data, which … 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_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":[9,11,10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experimental-hep-news","category-langlands","category-multiverse-mania","category-not-even-wrong-the-book"],"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\/3158","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=3158"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10892,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3158\/revisions\/10892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}