{"id":8357,"date":"2016-03-09T21:30:18","date_gmt":"2016-03-10T02:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8357"},"modified":"2016-03-09T21:30:18","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T02:30:18","slug":"this-and-that-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8357","title":{"rendered":"This and That"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few short items:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Nature has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/who-ordered-that-1.19514\">an editorial<\/a> this week summarizing the situation with the 750 GeV possible diphoton bump.  It mentions a new paper analyzing related data (the number of theory papers on this as a function of time).  The paper is called <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1603.01204\">A Theory of Ambulance Chasing<\/a>, and claims that looking at a large collection of similar fads producing theory papers, the high-level behavior of the HEP theory community can be well summarized by a model that requires only two parameters to fit the data.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re at Stanford tomorrow and a fan of multiverse mania, you can go hear Alexander Vilenkin talk about <a href=\"http:\/\/news.stanford.edu\/news\/2016\/march\/bunyan-lecture-vilenkin-030716.html\">The Universes Beyond the Horizon<\/a>.  According to the Stanford PR for this<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>Despite the similarities between Vilenkin&#8217;s theory and the Wikipedia summary of the film Interstellar, many scientists have hope for the multiverse theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Stanford physics faculty members seem to have innovative ideas about the scientific method, with one of them quoted as claiming<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Once a reasonable idea comes, you can never say it&#8217;s wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>which I guess could be taken as some sort of motto for research into string theory and the multiverse.\n<\/li>\n<li>CERN is running a series of articles about the Theory group there, first one is <a href=\"http:\/\/home.cern\/about\/updates\/2016\/02\/theory-welcome-theory-corridor\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Norbert Bodendorfer has a nice <a href=\"http:\/\/relatively-quantum.bodendorfer.eu\/\">new blog<\/a> about loop quantum gravity and related topics.<\/li>\n<li>The Templeton Foundation has mercifully stopped giving huge financial prizes to people for dubious attempts to bring religion and science together.  I hadn&#8217;t even realized they had already given out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.templetonprize.org\/currentwinner.html\">this year&#8217;s Templeton Prize<\/a>, which went to a British Rabbi.\n<p>Among the many things they fund is a recent $1.1 million grant for <a href=\"http:\/\/beyondspacetime.net\/\">this project<\/a> on the philosophical implications of quantum gravity.  They will hold a <a href=\"http:\/\/beyondspacetime.net\/2016summerschool\/\">summer school<\/a> this year (with Amanda Peet and Carlo Rovelli, that should be fun), and there&#8217;s a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\n\/c\/BeyondspacetimeNet\">Youtube channel<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Chris Quigg has an interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1602.07020\">overview of the future of HEP physics<\/a>.  I particularly like his emphasis on the questions<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>How are we prisoners of conventional thinking?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>and <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Might we have misunderstood the hierarchy problem, and so need to reframe it? Perhaps it is time to ask whether the unreasonable effectiveness of the standard model (to borrow a turn of phrase from Eugene Wigner) is itself a deep clue to what lies beyond.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few short items: Nature has an editorial this week summarizing the situation with the 750 GeV possible diphoton bump. It mentions a new paper analyzing related data (the number of theory papers on this as a function of time). &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8357\">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_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-8357","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\/8357","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=8357"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8359,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8357\/revisions\/8359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}