Just returned from a few days in Boston, will try and catch up here on various topics:<\/p>\n
Among the other interesting talks, Jim Arthur discussed the conjectural automorphic Langlands group, along the lines of this older paper<\/a>. He indulged in some speculation I’d never heard before, that Langlands functoriality might imply the Riemann hypothesis (somehow by analogy to something from Langlands about the Ramanujan conjecture appearing in Deligne’s proof of the RH in the function field case). Unfortunately the laptop being used to show his slides decided to start installing Windows Updates two-thirds of the way through his talk. For whatever reason, I didn’t manage to follow his comments at the end of the talk about something new having to do with Weil’s explicit formula in number theory. Consulting with some experts later though, I couldn’t find anyone optimistic about the Langlands implies RH speculation.<\/li>\n See here<\/a> for a Caltech workshop on the BICEP2 results. Andrei Linde’s talk<\/a> started with his complaining about the popular and textbook coverage of inflation. He said that when journalists call and ask him what BICEP2 will tell us about Grand Unification, he responds “nothing”. At the end of the talk, Sean Carroll asked him about the multiverse, with Linde’s response emphasizing what a great thing it is to have a theory that can’t be disproved:<\/p>\n If you cannot disprove it, then you have this powerful weapon of thinking about and explaining things around you in an anthropic way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n Update<\/strong>: The Princeton crowd now has a preprint out, with the detailed argument that BICEP2 can’t distinguish “gravitational waves” from “galactic schmutz”, see here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just returned from a few days in Boston, will try and catch up here on various topics: This past week I was able to attend some of the talks at the conference in honor of David Vogan’s 60th birthday. I’m … Continue reading