{"id":6230,"date":"2013-09-04T21:36:15","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T01:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6230"},"modified":"2013-10-22T12:30:25","modified_gmt":"2013-10-22T16:30:25","slug":"assorted-news-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6230","title":{"rendered":"Assorted News"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>This past weekend I was up in Boston and attended quite a few talks at the <a href=\"http:\/\/math.mit.edu\/conferences\/Gelfand\/\">Gelfand Centennial conference<\/a> at MIT, in honor of the 100th anniversary of I. M. Gelfand&#8217;s birth.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www-math.mit.edu\/~etingof\/gelfandab.pdf\">Abstracts of the talks<\/a> are available, but most of them were blackboard talks, not being recorded as far as I could tell.  I&#8217;ve been starting again on my project to learn more number theory, so found Matt Emerton&#8217;s and Akshay Venkatesh&#8217;s survey talks especially helpful.<br \/>\nThere was one long <a href=\"http:\/\/math.mit.edu\/conferences\/Gelfand\/recollections.php\">afternoon program of recollections of Gelfand<\/a> and his seminar from a long list of speakers, which went on into the evening banquet.  This was being recorded, so video will perhaps appear some day (Gindikin&#8217;s contribution was on video, available <a href=\"http:\/\/math.rutgers.edu\/%7Egindikin\/Gelfand_Boston_1.mov\">here<\/a>).  Another long afternoon session dealt with <a href=\"http:\/\/math.mit.edu\/conferences\/Gelfand\/legacy.php\">Gelfand&#8217;s mathematical legacy<\/a>, again perhaps at some point there will be video available of this.<\/li>\n<li>In mathematical news, speakers at next year&#8217;s ICM have now been announced, for both the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.icm2014.org\/en\/program\/scientific\/plenary\">plenary<\/a> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.icm2014.org\/en\/program\/scientific\/section\">various sections<\/a>.  Those interested in tea-leaf reading can consider for themselves what this new information says about who will get a Fields Medal next year. They might also appreciate <a href=\"http:\/\/abstrusegoose.com\/518\">this<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>A Fields Medal is worth just 15,000 Canadian dollars.  If you can claim some relation to physics, much better to have your friends get to work nominating you for a $3 million fundamental physics prize.  Online nominations for 2014 are <a href=\"http:\/\/fundamentalphysicsprize.org\/nominations\">here<\/a>, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/fundamentalphysicsprize.org\/news\/news6\">news<\/a> is that the three finalists for the $3 million will be announced this November.  The Selection committee will be the 11 previous theorist winners of the $3 million prize plus three LHC physicists from the experimental side.  The FPP also has some news <a href=\"http:\/\/fundamentalphysicsprize.org\/news\/news5\">here<\/a> about what some of the LHC experimentalist prize winners have done with the money.<\/li>\n<li>Historically unparalleled payments to the stars of the field seem to be part of a larger societal pattern, as well as a much grimmer picture for young non-stars. The situation on the theorist side is not news, but Adrian Cho at Science magazine has a story about the extremely ugly job prospects facing young LHC experimentalists, with the title <a href=\"http:\/\/sciencecareers.sciencemag.org\/career_magazine\/previous_issues\/articles\/2013_08_29\/caredit.a1300185\">After the LHC, the Deluge<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>In case you weren&#8217;t aware of this, see here for an explanation of why <a href=\"http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/at-work\/education\/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth\">The STEM Crisis is a Myth<\/a>.  One thing in that article I&#8217;d never seen before is Alan Greenspan&#8217;s explanation of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/business\/globe\/articles\/2007\/03\/14\/greenspan_let_more_skilled_immigrants_in\/\">why we need more H1B visas<\/a>: the inequality problem in the US is due to overpaid computer programmers, and these plutocrats can be dealt with by importing low-wage labor to take their jobs.<\/li>\n<li>Finally, for the latest in multiverse mania, New Scientist has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg21929333.200-death-by-higgs-rids-cosmos-of-space-brain-threat.html\">Death by Higgs rids cosmos of space brain threat<\/a> (and an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg21929332.100-boring-higgs-has-powers-we-never-dreamed-of.html\">editorial<\/a> about how this shows the Higgs is not &#8220;boring&#8221;). I knew there was no way they could resist Sean Carroll&#8217;s new paper dealing with the question: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1308.4686\">Can the Higgs Boson Save Us From the Menace of the Boltzmann Brains?<\/a>.  Sean has more about this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/22\/the-higgs-boson-vs-boltzmann-brains\/\">here<\/a>, and Jacques Distler has a discussion <a href=\"http:\/\/golem.ph.utexas.edu\/~distler\/blog\/archives\/002652.html\">here<\/a> which I think accurately reflects the views of physicists outside certain West Coast enclaves:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>Normally, I wouldn\u2019t touch a paper, with the phrase \u201cBoltzmann brains\u201d in the title, with a 10-foot pole. And anyone accosting me, intent on discussing the subject, would normally be treated as one of the walking undead&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>This is plainly nuts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I confess that this kind of thing completely mystifies me.  Carroll is an intelligent, well-informed, and almost always reliably sensible sort, with a keen devotion to the battle for scientific rationality against the forces of religion and obscurantism.  But he likes to pair this with an enthusiasm for pseudo-scientific multiverse wackiness that Distler&#8217;s &#8220;nuts&#8221; describes pretty well.  Very weird, and if you want to know why I keep referring to &#8220;mania&#8221; in this context, this is a good example.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This past weekend I was up in Boston and attended quite a few talks at the Gelfand Centennial conference at MIT, in honor of the 100th anniversary of I. M. Gelfand&#8217;s birth. Abstracts of the talks are available, but most &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6230\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania"],"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\/6230","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=6230"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6236,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230\/revisions\/6236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}