Comments on: Strings 2007: Share the Memories

By: News From The Front, V: Microscopic Weekend Diversions - Asymptotia

News From The Front, V: Microscopic Weekend Diversions - Asymptotia — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:32:26 +0000

[...] I had big plans to do a hike each day on the weekend, but physics intervened. I should explain a bit more. Earlier last week I eventually got around to following Nick’s suggestion from an earlier post to take a look at Andy Strominger’s Strings 2007 talk entitled “Search for the Holographic Dual of N Heterotic Strings”. It was the usual nice Strominger talk, where he motivates the physics very well, and presents interesting and clear thoughts on the problem in hand. I shall try to say a bit more about what it is about later on, but the general gist of it is that it is to do with understanding certain types of four dimensional black hole in string theory. As you may know, one of the extraordinarily successful results in string theory in the last decade (and slightly more) has been that we can understand one of the most central results of semi-classical quantum gravity -that they have an entropy and behave like thermodynamical objects (the work of Bekenstein and of Hawking from the early 70s)- in precise terms in the full theory of quantum gravity that string theory appears to present us with. This started with the work of Strominger and Vafa in 1996, that showed how to describe a large class of black holes as essentially made of extended objects called D-branes (about which I’ve spoken at length earlier1). [...]

By: Clifford

Clifford — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:03:33 +0000

Thanks Nick. I’ll have to look at Andy Strominger’s talk sometime soon. The title “Search for the Holographic Dual of N Heterotic Strings” is certainly of interest to me.

From what I’ve heard from others, it is indeed the case that there seems to be a lot of activity in a diverse range of areas. Getting increasingly hard for one person to keep up with all this progress as the field matures. Of course, this is good for the field, if frustrating for the individual!

Thanks.

-cvj

By: Nick Halmagyi

Nick Halmagyi — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:45:56 +0000

my take on Strings 2007 was that it was more like a math conference, where nobody expects to have their world erupted by a single talk but many people report on solid progress in pretty technical fields. I think it is only string theory people have such high expectations of the annual get together.

Three talks I liked were Seiberg’s, Strominger’s and Kovtun’s. I think I would have heard about Seiberg’s at some point, since it seems pretty important and I follow that stuff. Strominger’s however I venture to say I would be hard pressed to understand much of if I wasnt there. He was alarmingly honest about how much he actually understood about his computations and seeing this in the flesh gave me some perspective on his work. Kovtun’s talk was quite motivational, really got me interested in picking up these papers.

Really I think I used the conference as a way to get reminded of all the fun stuff out there and motivated to do something about it.

Of course Madrid being a pretty swank city helped me get over there…

By: Holmes

Holmes — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:39:21 +0000

One of the few justifiable reasons for attending talks is that you can try to judge, from body language, etc, the real views of the speakers. These things cannot reliably be judged from videos. So: anyone who was there: did Lisa Randall seem depressed by the rather downbeat message she was giving about black holes at the LHC? Or did she seem optimistic about the prospects of seeing anything at all? [Slides are impressive by the way, I recommend having a look; the field is in much better shape than many people think.] Again: when R Bousso claimed to have solved the cosmological constant problem, by postulating that numbers of observers correlates with entropy production, did he do so with a straight face?

By: Carl Brannen

Carl Brannen — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 04:46:21 +0000

Do string theorists not follow your blog? Are they shy? 452 physicists attended. They've had all day, I shouldn't be typing the first comment here. The only thing I found of mild interest was Jet quenching in string theory and heavy ion collisions by U. Wiedemann. One of the other set of slides I read was hand written and needed close to 100MB. Thanks for giving the link to the talks. I couldn't get past the mysterious picture of blind man's buff. [...snip...]

By: Not Even Wrong » Blog Archive » Various News

Not Even Wrong » Blog Archive » Various News — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:10:48 +0000