{"id":640,"date":"2008-01-16T15:34:17","date_gmt":"2008-01-16T20:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=640"},"modified":"2008-06-17T10:26:41","modified_gmt":"2008-06-17T15:26:41","slug":"updates-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=640","title":{"rendered":"Updates"},"content":{"rendered":"
  • On the HEP budget problem front, Adrian Cho has an interview with Ray Orbach<\/a> of the DOE. Orbach is not very encouraging on the prospects for a supplemental FY 2008 appropriation:
    \n

    \n… my assumption is that the last thing that Congress or the president wants is a decorated supplemental. Because, you come in for the Office of Science, and there will be somebody else coming in, and before you know it, the thing will be enormous. … My guess is that it would be very hard to single out a particular program for a supplemental.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    He does promise a very healthy FY 2009 proposed increase:<\/p>\n

    \nNow, I can’t tell you, obviously, the details of the president’s budget for ’09, but I can tell you that it will be a wonderful budget request. And because ’08 has been difficult for us, the gap between ’08 and ’09 will be large.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    He notes that the DOE and the president are convinced of the importance of supporting HEP research, that the problem is with the Congress:<\/p>\n

    I think now the high-energy physics community understands how Congress feels and has a job on its hands to explain why it should be supported at the level of the president’s request.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    He doesn’t shed any light on the continuing mystery of who exactly in Congress made the decision to target HEP for cuts or what their thinking was, leaving it still unclear who it is that the HEP community is supposed to be making its case to. It would be nice to know this before next Christmas, since if this person or person doesn’t change their minds before then, most of the US experimental HEP community may want to make permanent plans to either emigrate or go into a different line of work.<\/p>\n

    I’ve heard nothing about the effects of the FY 2008 budget on particle theory or string theory funding. Perhaps the plan of whoever is responsible for this is that the US should shift out of supporting experimental HEP research, and concentrate on string theory and anthropic landscape research, where it continues to hold a leadership position.<\/li>\n

  • Nature has an article entitled Experimental cosmology: cosmos in a bottle<\/a> about condensed matter analogs of black holes and physics related to cosmology. One topic covered is the recent bogus claim<\/a> to “test string theory” using interfaces in liquid helium to model branes. Paul Steinhardt notes one of many problems with this idea, that “string branes are flat and attract one another, whereas the helium-3 ‘branes’ are curved and have no attractive force.” Joe Polchinski on the other hand is more enthusiastic, since any prediction could have a big impact. “You never know what you might find” he says.<\/li>\n
  • The string theory hype machine remains in overdrive, putting out nonsense press releases at an unparalleled rate. This week’s string theory hype is from Japan, where KEK has put out a press release claiming Interior Structure of a Black Hole Computed Using Superstrings<\/a>, which tell us that:
    \n

    It is expected that superstring theory will develop further and play an important role in solving interesting problems such as the evaporation of black holes, the state of the early universe and the creation of everything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    The actual calculation behind the hype is a numerical simulation of a supersymmetric quantum mechanics system, which is described here<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    On the HEP budget problem front, Adrian Cho has an interview with Ray Orbach of the DOE. Orbach is not very encouraging on the prospects for a supplemental FY 2008 appropriation: … my assumption is that the last thing that … 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":[9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experimental-hep-news","category-this-weeks-hype"],"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\/640","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=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}