{"id":626,"date":"2007-12-04T15:37:28","date_gmt":"2007-12-04T20:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=626"},"modified":"2008-01-16T15:44:28","modified_gmt":"2008-01-16T20:44:28","slug":"news-from-all-over-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=626","title":{"rendered":"News From All Over"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a long and interesting profile of Jim Simons<\/a> on the Bloomberg web-site. It begins with him being told he has a call from Harvard string theorist Cumrun Vafa. Unclear whether Vafa was calling to talk about something related to science or something related to finance, since I’ve heard from several sources that Vafa recently has been working at least part of the time for Renaissance Technologies, the Simons hedge fund.<\/p>\n

Director Ron Howard is making a movie based on the novel “Angels and Demons”, part of which will be filmed at CERN. Here’s a news report on his visit to CERN<\/a> <\/p>\n

Witten has posted two papers to the arXiv, one old, one new. The old one is Conformal Field Theory in Four and Six Dimensions<\/a>, the write-up of his talk at the Oxford conference celebrating Graeme Segal’s 60th birthday back in 2002. Until now this paper hasn’t been available on the internet, you had to buy the book of the conference proceedings. It has acquired some new interest because of Witten’s recent work on geometric Langlands, where Langlands duality comes from a duality symmetry that is part of a conjectured SL(2,Z<\/strong>) symmetry of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills in four dimensions. This SL(2,Z<\/strong>) can be explained by the existence of a superconformal theory in 6d, which can then be reduced to 4d by taking it on the product of an elliptic curve and a 4-manifold. The modular symmetry then comes from the elliptic curve.<\/p>\n

The new paper is with Alex Maloney and entitled Quantum Gravity Partition Functions in Three Dimensions<\/a>. They calculate the partition function of pure gravity on an AdS3 space by summing the contributions from classical geometries, including quantum corrections, finding that “the result is not physically sensible”. The paper includes a speculative discussion about what this might mean. It looks like 3d quantum gravity is still a subject that is far from completely understood.<\/p>\n

Slides from talks<\/a> at the recent HEPAP meeting are available. The FY2008 US budget for particle physics remains caught up in struggle between the White House and the Congress. They all agreed on a quite healthy budget number for particle physics, but haven’t agreed on an overall budget. One possibility, a continuing resolution splitting the difference between the Congressional and White House total numbers, might possibly lead to a smaller particle physics budget than expected.<\/p>\n

Physical Review Letters is publishing the latest paper by Chamseddine and Connes on their non-commutative geometry approach to the Standard Model. The PRL editor evidently forced them to change the name of the paper, from “A Dress for SM the Beggar” to Conceptual Explanation for the Algebra in the Noncommutative Approach to the Standard Model<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a long and interesting profile of Jim Simons on the Bloomberg web-site. It begins with him being told he has a call from Harvard string theorist Cumrun Vafa. Unclear whether Vafa was calling to talk about something related to … Continue reading →<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-626","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\/626","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=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}