If you’ve already seen the various new math\/physics films coming out of Hollywood, this week you might be interested in watching some of the real thing, including the following:<\/p>\n
“Since the 1970s the evidence has accumulated that the structures appearing in the laws of nature at a really fundamental level are vastly smaller than anything we encounter in our high energy laboratories.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
which I don’t think I’d personally agree with, quite curious to see what case he makes. These lectures often are later made available here<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- For another historical lecture, there will be a webcast of this event at CERN on Tuesday<\/a>. It features film of interviews with Roy Glauber, characterized as “the last living scientist from the Theory Division of the Manhattan Project”. Glauber taught the first quantum field theory course I ever took, at Harvard in 1976-77, almost forty years ago (I thought he was pretty ancient at the time). The year earlier I had taken quantum mechanics with Norman Ramsey, here shown signing Fat Man<\/a>. At the time it seemed perfectly normal that all my instructors had gotten their start designing weapons.<\/li>\n
- If you’re in Berkeley this week, you could attend a Langlands-related conference at MSRI, which in addition is honoring Michael Harris. Program is here<\/a>, videos to appear soon after the talks.<\/li>\n
- Recently concluded at MSRI was a workshop on geometric representation theory, with lots of interesting talks, videos available here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Update<\/strong>: There is supposed to be video from Ferrara here<\/a>, but not working. A press conference was held, but the only thing I see from Planck online is in French here<\/a>. Nothing about primordial gravitational waves, just confirmation of the standard cosmological model and of 3 neutrinos.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong>: No public release of any numbers from Planck that I can see, although they are being discussed in Ferrara. People are pointing out that the authoritative source for the best values of cosmological parameters at the moment is Twitter.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong>: Peter Coles has this take<\/a> on the Ferrara Planck results: “a bit of a farce.” Among the many oddities here, it seems that only the French component of Planck is putting out any news to the public.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong>: Adrian Cho at Science has a report about the latest Planck results here<\/a>. Speculation is that Planck data alone and their joint analysis with BICEP2 will not see a gravitational wave signal, just set an upper limit. Planck is supposed to release papers Dec. 22, unclear if this will include the analysis with BICEP2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you’ve already seen the various new math\/physics films coming out of Hollywood, this week you might be interested in watching some of the real thing, including the following: The hot ticket this week will be Monday’s Planck session at … Continue reading
![signing Fat Man<\/a>. At the time it seemed perfectly normal that all my instructors had gotten their start designing weapons.<\/li>\nIf you’re in Berkeley this week, you could attend a Langlands-related conference at MSRI, which in addition is honoring Michael Harris. Program is here<\/a>, videos to appear soon after the talks.<\/li>\nRecently concluded at MSRI was a workshop on geometric representation theory, with lots of interesting talks, videos available here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nUpdate<\/strong>: There is supposed to be video from Ferrara here<\/a>, but not working. A press conference was held, but the only thing I see from Planck online is in French here<\/a>. Nothing about primordial gravitational waves, just confirmation of the standard cosmological model and of 3 neutrinos.<\/p>\nUpdate<\/strong>: No public release of any numbers from Planck that I can see, although they are being discussed in Ferrara. People are pointing out that the authoritative source for the best values of cosmological parameters at the moment is Twitter.<\/p>\nUpdate<\/strong>: Peter Coles has this take<\/a> on the Ferrara Planck results: “a bit of a farce.” Among the many oddities here, it seems that only the French component of Planck is putting out any news to the public.<\/p>\nUpdate<\/strong>: Adrian Cho at Science has a report about the latest Planck results here<\/a>. Speculation is that Planck data alone and their joint analysis with BICEP2 will not see a gravitational wave signal, just set an upper limit. Planck is supposed to release papers Dec. 22, unclear if this will include the analysis with BICEP2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you’ve already seen the various new math\/physics films coming out of Hollywood, this week you might be interested in watching some of the real thing, including the following: The hot ticket this week will be Monday’s Planck session at … 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_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7378","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\/7378","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=7378"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7390,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7378\/revisions\/7390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Norman_Foster_Ramsey,_Jr.#mediaviewer\/File:Ramsey_signs_the_Fat_man.jpg\"){kind=link}