{"id":6069,"date":"2013-06-25T17:32:31","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T21:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6069"},"modified":"2013-07-08T10:32:22","modified_gmt":"2013-07-08T14:32:22","slug":"strings-2013-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6069","title":{"rendered":"Strings 2013 etc."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>These days one can just about attend a wide variety of summer conferences from the comfort of one&#8217;s home or office, with talks appearing online more or less immediately after they are given. This week some possibilities to consider are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The big yearly string theory conference, Strings 2013, is in Seoul this week with about 279 physicists in attendance, talks are available <a href=\"http:\/\/strings2013.sogang.ac.kr\/\">here<\/a>.  As usual for recent string theory conferences, there aren&#8217;t a lot of strings to be seen.  Perhaps these yearly conferences should be renamed something like &#8220;Conference on the latest topics popular among people who used to do string theory&#8221;. No sign at all of the landscape or string theory unification.  For some understanding of why, see <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1306.5083\">Life at the Interface of Particle Physics and String Theory<\/a>, to be published by Reviews of Modern Physics, which makes pretty clear why the organizers of Strings 20XX now want to avoid this topic.<\/li>\n<li>The 2013 Lepton Photon conference is in San Francisco this week, talks <a href=\"https:\/\/indico.cern.ch\/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&#038;confId=242095\">here<\/a>.  To mark the occasion, Gordon Watts and Jacques Distler have thrown in the towel, paying up on their bet with Tommaso Dorigo that the LHC would find SUSY or other &#8220;new physics&#8221;.  Tommaso has the full story <a href=\"http:\/\/www.science20.com\/quantum_diaries_survivor\/those_1000_said_no_new_physics_tev_scale_and_they_did_not_lie-115418\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>For the more philosophically minded, the Templeton Foundation is funding a summer institute on the Philosophy of Cosmology, and you can follow the talks <a href=\"http:\/\/hipacc.ucsc.edu\/IPC2013.html\">here<\/a>.  If thinking about time is your thing and you&#8217;ve missed out on the free summer amongst the redwoods, there&#8217;s still time to get in line for Templeton funds, with a few days left to apply for grants <a href=\"http:\/\/newagendasstudyoftime.wordpress.com\/grants\/\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: To round out the list, I should have included something for the mathematical physicists, this week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.impa.br\/opencms\/en\/eventos\/store\/evento_1301\">Symmetries in Mathematics and Physics<\/a> conference in Rio.  Videos of the talks are appearing <a href=\"http:\/\/video.impa.br\/index.php?page=symmetries-in-mathematics-and-physics-ii\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: Jacques Distler has a posting <a href=\"http:\/\/golem.ph.utexas.edu\/~distler\/blog\/archives\/002630.html\">here<\/a> (or guest post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.science20.com\/quantum_diaries_survivor\/guest_post_jacques_distler_why_i_lost_750_new_physics_lhc-115675\">here<\/a>) conceding the loss of his bet with Tommaso Dorigo. Unlike some other theorists (e.g. John Ellis) who are arguing that everything&#8217;s fine, one just has to wait until 2015-6 for the higher energy LHC run, Distler is more of a realist:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;would I be willing to bet on the 2015 LHC run uncovering new BSM physics?<\/p>\n<p>The answer, I think, is: not unless you were willing to give me some substantial odds (at least 5\u20131; if I think about it, maybe even higher).<\/p>\n<p>Knowing the mass of the Higgs (\u223c125GeV) rules out huge swaths of BSM ideas. Seeing absolutely nothing in the 7 and 8 TeV data (not even the sort of 2-3\u03c3 deviations that, while not sufficient to claim a \u201cdiscovery,\u201d might at least serve as tantalizing hints of things to come) disfavours even more.<\/p>\n<p>The probability (in my Bayesian estimation) that the LHC will discover BSM physics has gone from fairly likely (as witnessed by my previous willingness to take even-odds) to rather unlikely. N.B.: that\u2019s not quite the same thing as saying that there\u2019s no BSM physics at these energies; rather that, if it\u2019s there, the LHC won\u2019t be able to see it (at least, not without accumulating many years worth of data).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>These days one can just about attend a wide variety of summer conferences from the comfort of one&#8217;s home or office, with talks appearing online more or less immediately after they are given. This week some possibilities to consider are: &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6069\">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":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strings-2xxx"],"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\/6069","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=6069"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6088,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6069\/revisions\/6088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}