{"id":4408,"date":"2012-01-31T12:10:59","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T17:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4408"},"modified":"2012-01-31T13:02:37","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T18:02:37","slug":"short-items-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4408","title":{"rendered":"Short Items"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few short items:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No Higgs news on the LHC front, but on the BSM front today&#8217;s CERN talk <a href=\"https:\/\/indico.cern.ch\/getFile.py\/access?resId=0&#038;materialId=slides&#038;confId=174936\">Update on Searches for New Physics in CMS<\/a> provides more evidence against the various exotic scenarios heavily advertised over the last twenty years.  No sign of extra dimensions, SUSY, or other exotics.  For more, see <a href=\"http:\/\/resonaances.blogspot.com\/2012\/01\/new-year-same-old-song.html\">Resonaances<\/a>.  SUSY proponents now seem to be somewhere between the first stage of grief (&#8220;denial&#8221;) and the second (&#8220;anger&#8221;, see e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/resonaances.blogspot.com\/2012\/01\/susy-and-higgs-romance-or-drama.html?showComment=1327463218709#c619800064978870860\">here<\/a>) and on their way to the third (Bargaining &#8211; &#8220;I&#8217;ll do anything for a few more years&#8221;).<\/li>\n<li>From <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/seanmcarroll\/statuses\/164135468609454080\">Sean Carroll&#8217;s Twitter feed<\/a> I learned about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pitt.edu\/~pittcntr\/Being_here\/last_donut\/donut_2011-12\/10-14-11_qft.html\">this long description<\/a> of a recent workshop bringing together philosophers and quantum field theorists.  I guess my take on the &#8220;heuristic&#8221; vs. &#8220;mathematical&#8221; quantum field theory debate is that we need both, since there is still a huge amount we fundamentally don&#8217;t understand about QFT.<\/li>\n<li>For a finite number of degrees of freedom, quantum mechanics itself is, unlike QFT, rather well understood.  For a nice recent review of some topics in the mathematics of quantization, see Ivan Todorov&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/preprints.ihes.fr\/2012\/P\/P-12-01.pdf\">Quantization is a mystery<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s not only string theorists producing over-hyped university press releases, there&#8217;s things like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/pub_releases\/2012-01\/cwru-rte012612.php\">this<\/a>. See more discussion <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/news\/2012\/01\/how-the-craziest-fing-theory-of-everything-got-published-and-promoted.ars\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few short items: No Higgs news on the LHC front, but on the BSM front today&#8217;s CERN talk Update on Searches for New Physics in CMS provides more evidence against the various exotic scenarios heavily advertised over the last &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4408\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4408","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\/4408","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=4408"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4416,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4408\/revisions\/4416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}