Friday’s Southern California Strings Seminar was a success! Thanks to all who came, who spoke, and the UCLA organizers. I enjoyed all four talks that were put on, and learned a lot from each. (Sera Cremonini is giving her nice talk about duals of hyperscaling violating theories in the photo.)
I was particularly pleased about the talk by Daniel Harlow about the Firewall issue, since I’ve been thinking for some time that a bit more of the language of quantum information theory ought to be brought to bear to some of the discussions, and the work he discussed seems to me to be exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. I rather like the results as well, although I may simply have been seduced by the excellent presentation, since I’ve not actually worked through their computations. (See here for more.) It seems to me to be a nice way of showing not only that we need a better formulation of physics to discuss the issues concerning black holes and their evaporation, but showing relatively sharply one of the places where things about the current formulation are broken.
Anyway, it was a good day. I regret not being able to join the group for dinner afterwards, but I had to get home early to prepare for a very early start. I’d an 8:15am call time for a shoot. (Pilot for a new online science show. I’ll tell you more about that as more develops. If more develops.)
Rumour has it that UC San Diego might be the venue for the next SCSS. Fantastic!
-cvj
Awesome! Sad I missed it!