{"id":7168,"date":"2014-09-05T16:40:23","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T20:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7168"},"modified":"2014-09-05T16:40:23","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T20:40:23","slug":"quick-links-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7168","title":{"rendered":"Quick Links"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well worth reading is <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1409.1196\">High Energy Colliding Beams; What Is Their Future<\/a>, by Burton Richter.  Richter is one of the pioneers of designing and building colliders, and he starts off by recounting some of the history.  About proposals for a 100 TeV collider he comments on the challenges of doing this at high luminosity and the danger that the cost will be prohibitive (one thing I haven&#8217;t seen in these discussions is cost estimates), and asks why there is no large-scale program to develop low-cost high-Tc superconducting magnets.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s critical of the film Particle Fever on the same grounds discussed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6308\">here<\/a> (its portrayal of the only possibilities as being SUSY or the multiverse).  About the multiverse, he writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There are two problems with the landscape idea. The first is a logic one. You cannot prove a negative, so you cannot say that there is no more to learn. The second is practical. If it is all random there is no point in funding theorists, experimenters, or accelerator builders. We don\u2019t have to wait until we are priced out of the market, there is no reason to go on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For some mathematics news, first there&#8217;s the <a href=\"https:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/flyspeck\/wiki\/AnnouncingCompletion\">announcement from the Flyspeck project<\/a> of the completion of a formal proof version of the proof of the Kepler Conjecture by Thomas Hales.  Hales is in Berkeley this week talking about something unrelated (the Langlands program) at an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msri.org\/workshops\/707\">introductory workshop<\/a> for this semester&#8217;s MSRI program on geometric representation theory. I&#8217;ve been watching some of the videos of the workshop talks, all of which have been quite good.<\/p>\n<p>Also in Berkeley this semester is Peter Scholze&#8217;s course, with video of the first lecture <a href=\"https:\/\/www.msri.org\/seminars\/20968\">here<\/a>, notes <a href=\"http:\/\/math.bu.edu\/people\/jsweinst\/Math274\/ScholzeLectures.pdf\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In yet more Berkeley news, in December they&#8217;ll host a mathematical physics workshop on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.northwestern.edu\/~celliott\/workshop\/\">Mathematical Aspects of Six-Dimensional QFTs<\/a>.  Better understanding the 6d N=(2,0) superconformal theory and its implications for various lower-dimensional phenomena is the main target here, a topic that will also be discussed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.birs.ca\/events\/2015\/5-day-workshops\/15w5154\">here<\/a> in the spring (where the 6d theory is called &#8220;Theory X&#8221;).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well worth reading is High Energy Colliding Beams; What Is Their Future, by Burton Richter. Richter is one of the pioneers of designing and building colliders, and he starts off by recounting some of the history. About proposals for a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7168\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-langlands"],"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\/7168","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=7168"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7170,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7168\/revisions\/7170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}