{"id":706,"date":"2008-07-01T06:47:11","date_gmt":"2008-07-01T11:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=706"},"modified":"2008-10-10T08:40:18","modified_gmt":"2008-10-10T13:40:18","slug":"physics-nobel-laureates-at-lindau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=706","title":{"rendered":"Physics Nobel Laureates at Lindau"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week there’s a Nobel Laureate Meeting<\/a> in Lindau, devoted to physics. Many of the talks can be viewed on-line<\/a>. From 3-5pm today (Lindau time) there will be a session<\/a> devoted to a panel discussion of expectations for the LHC. Besides the Lindau web-site, a webcast will also be available here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Blogging (in German) is going on here<\/a>, including accounts of the late night activities there, featuring pictures<\/a> of physicists dancing to the tune “Sex Bomb”.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: The panel discussion included two questions from the audience about the multiverse. At first Gross refused to address them leaving cosmologist Smoot to try and say something. Finally ‘t Hooft broke in to say that there were a lot of misconceptions being spread about the multiverse, but that the truth was that the LHC will never have anything to say about either the multiverse or string theory, and Gross did not disagree with him. ‘t Hooft explained that while in principle there could be indirect evidence for a multiverse (from direct evidence for aspects of a theory that implied multiple universes), at the moment the idea was completely untestable and the LHC would have nothing to say about it. Gross agreed, describing multiverse models and research as “very ill-defined”.<\/p>\n

At the end, an argument between Veltman and others broke out over the selling of particle physics using astrophysics. He described claims that the LHC will “recreate the Big Bang” as “idiotic”, and as “crap”. He said that this is “not science”, but “blather”, and that the field would come to regret this, arguing that if you start selling the LHC with pseudo-science, you will end up paying for it. Gross and Smoot politely disagreed.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> See here<\/a> for Gross’s talk on expectations of what will be seen at the LHC. He predicts definite observation of a Higgs particle, and says he has taken bets that supersymmetry will be seen, at 50-50 odds. Nothing about string theory at the LHC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week there’s a Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, devoted to physics. Many of the talks can be viewed on-line. From 3-5pm today (Lindau time) there will be a session devoted to a panel discussion of expectations for the LHC. … 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-706","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\/706","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=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":990,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions\/990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}