A couple conferences going on this week have already put some of the talks online.<\/p>\n
SLAC has a summer school each year, aimed more at experimentalists than theorists. This year’s topic is “Nature’s Greatest Puzzles”<\/A> and there are quite a few interesting talks already online there.<\/p>\n The Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics is hosting this year’s String Phenomenology 2004<\/A> conference. The “Landscape” seems to be a big topic; two online talks are Michael Douglas’s<\/A>, which is more or less the same as his one at Strings 2004 a few weeks ago, and Michael Dine’s<\/A>. Dine seems optimistic that the Landscape will lead to predictions, saying<\/p>\n “If we adopt the anthropic viewpoint, we may be lead to predictions – perhaps the first predictive framework for string theory”<\/p>\n Before taking this too seriously, one should note that Dine has been giving review talks about “superstring phenomenology” and claiming that predictions are right around the corner since before most of our incoming students at Columbia were born (see his 1986 Erice lectures, no, they’re not online, this was way before the arXiv). <\/p>\n And I’m headed off soon for a short vacation out of the range of the internet, back late next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple conferences going on this week have already put some of the talks online. SLAC has a summer school each year, aimed more at experimentalists than theorists. This year’s topic is “Nature’s Greatest Puzzles” and there are quite a … Continue reading