{"id":4527,"date":"2012-03-30T17:09:11","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T21:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4527"},"modified":"2012-04-12T11:39:33","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T15:39:33","slug":"the-darth-vader-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4527","title":{"rendered":"The Darth Vader Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week at Caltech there&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hep.caltech.edu\/ym35\/\">workshop<\/a> celebrating the 35th anniversary of N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory.  George Musser of Scientific American is covering the workshop <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/observations\/2012\/03\/30\/the-emperor-darth-vader-and-the-ultimate-ultimate-theory-of-physics-2\/\">here<\/a>.  He reports that N=4 Super Yang-Mills is being describe as the &#8220;Darth Vader theory&#8221;, I guess by Nima Arkani-Hamed.  The conjectural 6d (2,0) superconformal theory gets called &#8220;the Emperor Palpatine of theories&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps slides from the talks will be posted at some point. Witten will close the workshop tomorrow with a talk not about Darth Vader or the Emperor Palpatine, but about &#8220;Superstring perturbation theory revisited&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>\nUpdate<\/strong>: Clifford Johnson reports on the conference <a href=\"http:\/\/asymptotia.com\/2012\/03\/30\/conferring\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  Someone at the conference confirms that the &#8220;Darth Vader&#8221; description came from Arkani-Hamed, who in his talk said something like:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The relation between 4D N=4 SYM and the 6D (2, 0) theory is just like that between Darth Vader and the Emperor. You see Darth Vader and you think &#8220;Isn&#8217;t he just great? How can anyone be greater than that? No way&#8217;.Then you meet the Emperor&#8221;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  A couple reports from the conference banquet.  During his presentation Dan Freedman unveiled his new textbook on Supergravity (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/supergravity\">here<\/a>) and offered to sell copies to those attending the conference at 20% off.  Stephen Hawking was there.  He&#8217;s in Pasadena for his yearly visit and to appear in an episode of &#8220;The Big Bang Theory&#8221;.  The show&#8217;s writers and producers are very excited about the &#8220;Darth Vader\/Emperor Palatine&#8221; thing and planning on working it into the show&#8217;s script.  Afterwards Hawking invited many people to join him and some of the cast of the show on a trip out to his favorite club in San Bernadino.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: Given that the previous update was written on April 1, readers might want to have some suspicions about whether it is completely accurate.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  Some slides from the talks are now available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hep.caltech.edu\/ym35\/ym.php?p=lecture_titles.php\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week at Caltech there&#8217;s a workshop celebrating the 35th anniversary of N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory. George Musser of Scientific American is covering the workshop here. He reports that N=4 Super Yang-Mills is being describe as the &#8220;Darth Vader theory&#8221;, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4527\">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_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-4527","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\/4527","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=4527"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4571,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4527\/revisions\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}