An assortment of interesting things I’ve run across recently:<\/p>\n
There’s something called Multiversal Journeys<\/a> that seems to organize lecture series on theoretical physics, with a special interest in the multiverse (at least to the extent of using it as an inspiration for the organization’s name).<\/p>\n UC Davis particle physicist John Terning has a weblog<\/a>. Also a new graduate-level text book on supersymmetric field theories, entitled Modern Supersymmetry: Dynamics and Duality<\/a>, soon to be published by Oxford.<\/p>\n Ever since 2001, the physicists in Paris have been running a Seminaire Poincare<\/a>, modeled after the mathematicians famous Seminaire Bourbaki<\/a>. The latest Seminaire Poincare was on the topic of Quantum Decoherence<\/a>, and texts from the older meetings are available<\/a>.<\/p>\n Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam has an updated version of his 1965 article “A Philosopher Looks at Quantum Mechanics” in the latest issue of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. It is entitled A Philosopher Looks at Quantum Mechanics (Again)<\/a>. Part of my misspent youth involved taking several philosophy courses as an undergraduate at Harvard, including ones from Quine and Putnam.<\/p>\n In November, Joe Lykken<\/a> gave a particle physics seminar at Princeton entitled Is particle physics ready for the LHC?<\/a> His talk explains some of the challenges particle physics will face at the LHC. The next-to-last slide is a none too subtle dig at the lack of any particle phenomenology going on at my alma mater. It is entitled “is Princeton ready for the LHC?”, and lists the titles of the particle theory seminars going on at Princeton during the period before his talk.<\/p>\n The International Committe for Future Accelerators (ICFA) has a new web-site<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Tevatron has recently achieved new luminosity records, both for peak luminosity and integrated luminosity over a week. You can follow the status of the Tevatron here<\/a>.<\/p>\n A beautiful new paper by Greg Landweber<\/a> and Megumi Harada<\/a> has just appeared. It is entitled A comparison of abelian and non-abelian symplectic quotients<\/a> and uses equivariant K-theory methods to get the relation between the K-theories of the symplectic quotients M\/\/G and M\/\/T, here T is the maximal torus of a compact Lie group G.<\/p>\n Update:<\/b> One more. Slate<\/a> today is advertising Meaning of Life TV<\/a>, where various people, including some physicists, do things like promote the idea that the anthropic principle shows religion has a lot to do with science. This site has been around for a while, but just now has affiliated with Slate. Looking at it I thought “funny, this is the only thing like this trying to inject religion into science that doesn’t seem to be a Templeton Foundation<\/a> project.” Then I saw the About Us<\/a> link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An assortment of interesting things I’ve run across recently: There’s something called Multiversal Journeys that seems to organize lecture series on theoretical physics, with a special interest in the multiverse (at least to the extent of using it as an … Continue reading