Strings 2007: Share the Memories
A big chunk of yesterday (recall, I’m visiting at the Aspen Center for Physics) was spent chatting with old friends in the field I have not seen in a while, including going for a walk or two in the local surrounds with colleagues, discussing some of the physics issues of the day.
One of the things that comes up a lot with everyone I spoke to (and met at lunch, and in corridors and so forth) was Strings 2007, the big annual meeting that was held in Madrid last month (blog post here). It comes up in the form of people asking each other things like: “were you at Strings?”, “what did you think of Strings?”, “what were your favourite talks?”, “is there any interesting gossip about…?” (where the latter is not necessarily directly about physics).
So it occurred to me that some of those conversations and responses might be useful to workers in the field. Of course, you can just sit and work your way through the entire collection of online talks, a good thing to do. But it’s interesting to hear from others what talks they liked, and why, just as we do (and maybe have done) over tea and coffee in lounges all over the world after someone returns from a meeting. Often, this is where we hear of some excellent work by the less famous speakers (or even by someone who did not talk at all), etc.
So I’ll kick off. Although I was not there, and have yet to start a serious assault on […] Click to continue reading this post
But anyway, where was I? Oh, right. Someone called John Barrowman (apparently one of the stars on those shows? He plays a scientist? I honestly don’t know, but you will, if you’re a fan) took a visit to CERN (the particle physics lab in Europe you often read about here and elsewhere) to better inform himself about the intersection between science and science fiction. One of the resulting jumpy noisy and (reportedly) fun videos can be found on YouTube here. There are some somewhat interesting animations alongside some of the, er…jolly madcap fun, illustrating the physics. Following the particles along the beam-pipe to the collision is not a view I’ve seen before, I’ll admit.
I’ve not had time to look at this closely, but there’s been some remarkable news about the possible detection of water in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet. Wow!
This got me thinking a bit about where we are going with all these resources, how useful they are, and -very importantly- how easy it all is to find, and then to search through. (Imagine there are 10 hour long talks broadly on your favourite topic. Assuming there are no accompanying files, how can you search them to find a specific fact that they might mention, without sitting through ten hours worth of material?) Well, ironically, one of the first things that caught my eye on SciTalks was a rather nice talk by Jennifer Golbeck (given at FermiLab last year) entitled “Social Networks, the Semantic Web, and the Future of Online Scientific Collaborationâ€. She’s quite interesting about this very topic… She describes online collaboration, data sharing, social networks, etc, all in the context of helping us do science (not just physics by the way!). She also illustrates her subject matter -still staying on topic- using examples of data sets from Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, […] 
