Southern California Strings Seminar

On Friday and Saturday of this week (December 1st and 2nd), the next Southern California Strings Seminar will be happening! It’s a regional meeting for people doing research in string theory and related topics, and as I’ve said before, I’d especially like to see more young people come out and take part. We make a special effort to ask the speakers to spend a little time at the beginning of their talk setting the scene (speaking about motivations, what has gone before, etc) so that the series can be of great value to people who are trying to learn what’s going on in a particular topic at research level (this can be students, postdocs, or faculty, in fact).

If you’re doing this kind of physics research anywhere in the Southern California region, and want to take part, please come. See the website for details, and try to let the hosts -this time it is UCLA- know that you’re coming so that they can arrange refreshements. (They’ll be asking for a contribution of about $5-$10 to help with lunches, cookies, coffee, and other goodies that will be on tap during the day.)

From the main page of the website, I wrote:

Join us as we (members of several of the local groups with interest in string theory and related topics) sit together to discuss new ideas and developments (both general and technical) in the field. The presentations will be accompanied by plenty of discussion and in the first part of each talk the speaker will take special care to set the scene and context of the work in a pedagogical manner so as to encourage participation by younger members of the field.

The last one -on the USC campus- was earlier this semester (September 29th and 30th) and was very successful. You can see the webpage for it here, with some online materials. I never found time to blog about the details of it (I did one little post with a picture and a brief discussion here), which is unfortunate, but that happens sometimes. Sorry about that. The pictures on this page are from that event.

-cvj