Thanks very much for this! It’s very useful indeed.

Best,

-cvj

As an outsider (so far) of string theory community and an involved participant of Quark Matter 2006 -Shanghai ( I served on the International Advisory Committee of the past few QM conferences and helped local organizers of this meeting with the scientific program), I would like to provide some facts about the meeting and the Theory Summary (we call it Rapporteur Talk) that has spiked so much discussions. I think these facts are useful for an meaningful and informed discussion, before you reach any conclusion based on prejudice or stereotype of what heavy-ion physics is about (for a complete program of the meeting see: http://www.sinap.ac.cn/qm2006/index.html).

(1)The Theory Summary by Larry McLerran was one of the rapporteur talks which was to summarize theoretical presentations at the meeting. The speakers are free to inject his/her own comments. Critical comments on papers presented at the meeting in those rapporteur talks are very common and are essential for the health of the field, or any scientific endeavor.

(2)As a tradition in Quark Matter conferences, no comments or questions are allowed from the audience at the end of each rapporteur talk.

(3)There are four invited plenary talks in the program that focused on or discussed about AdS/CFT and heavy-ion collisions: (a) AdS/CFT and QGP by Dam Son (b) Mach cone in quark-gluon plasma by Jorge Casalderrey-Solana (b) AdS/CFT and jet quenching by Hong Liu (c) Physics opportunities at LHC by Urs Wiedemann. Three of the above speakers have been working on heavy-ion theory for some time.

(4) In addition to the four plenary talks, Dam Son also have an hour-long lecture on AdS/CFT and QGP in the student lectures the day before the conference. A post-conference workshop on AdS/CFT and strongly coupled quark matter was also held in Beijing (http://qm.phys.tsinghua.edu.cn/thu-henp/sqm/organizers.htm).

Xin-Nian Wang

Thanks!

-cvj

Of course speculation of a layman in regards to what must be done in testing the physics process.

Clifford:“There is nothing wrong with being publicly excited by the possibility, though…”

Maybe, if seen in relation to the cosmological understanding of the universe who could not be impressed? Increase activity of suns?

The conditions are being created in microstate blackhole creations?

“Superfluid attributes” and it’s tunneling in this context, are quite interesting to look at in probing the perfect fluid? Tried to keep it short.

Thanks for the link. I mostly agree with you. In case you’ve never been at a heavy ion conference though, I should add it’s quite common that their criticism is very *ooohm* straightforward. Insecurity is not a word I can connect with ‘The nuclear people’

The reason for my post was simply that I think there is more communication necessary between string theorists pursuing the AdS/CFT approach to RHIC physics and the heavy-ion community. This is a process which has only begun, one that I welcome very much, but one that shouldn’t stop with putting the word ‘RHIC’ in a title of a talk.

I am not surprised by the split reaction of the heavy ion guys (I’ve heard criticism not only from McLarren). They are of course defending their models, and before they believe that AdS/CFT is a cool thing, it will have to compete with the established approaches. This was to expect, and I actually think it’s a reasonable requirement.

On the other hand, I’ve not heard one single heavy-ion guy saying this is uninteresting, or nonsense. It’s more like (in my impression) they are definitely interested, but also kind of frustrated because the usefulness of AdS/CFT isn’t yet really good quantified - and, let me be honest, its not always really obvious what you string theorists are talking about in your seminars…

Best,

B.