147. Death of blogosphere, birth of blogosphere and Christmas wishes
Save This Post as PDF1. So, death or birth?
Recently, too many people simultaneously started claiming that “the blogosphere is dead” – see, for example, the post by Nicholas Carr who started the desperation or the Bee’s blog post where she explains who actually killed the blogosphere (capitalist imperialist pigs, who else might have wanted to do that?).
Actually, my opinion is radically opposite to theirs – I think that the blogosphere is in the very beginning of its evolution. Yes, seemingly blogosphere gets slowly dominated by collective professional blogs. First of all, is it everywhere around the blogosphere like this? I am a lucky person – I can speak Russian. As a result, I was able to notice what happened to the Russian-speaking sector of LiveJournal (you may not believe me, but recall a rather important fact that LiveJournal was recently bought by the Russian internet startup – SixApart). It currently represents a huge think tank (or better say – reactor of thought?), where politics, economics, and technology news are discussed by thousands of people collecting hundreds of comments per their single blog post. (A note for Bee: observe that advertisement, rather heavy nowadays, somehow was unable to kill this phenomenon. Why?)
The physics blogosphere is yet to become such a reactor of thought, but I would expect that this process is unstoppable, the outcome 
is inevitable 
and it would be so much fun to actually follow the evolution of physics blogosphere, that I decided to collect in one place the links to recent nice (that is, technical or more or less advanced) blog posts devoted to physics. Another reason for doing this is my personal convenience – I will collect links just in case I’ll want to easily find some posts of interest without consulting my rather extended and unordered bookmark list
I would also like to use the nice possibility provided by WordPress and send trackbacks to all original posts Just in case the authors will see the trackbacks and visit NEQNET, I have also prepared a long list of Christmas wishes for them Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle aaaaall the waaaay
So, here we go.
2. My Christmas wishes to physics blogosphere
Peter Woit has turned to the light side of the Force starting publishing his notes on BRST symmetry. What is BRST quantization in short? 
You use what you know from Lie groups and algebras to work with gauge theories because the gauge group is infinite dimensional Lie groups, so the corresponding Lie algebra should act trivially on physical states of the theory. Here is what is published so far.
- Representation theory and quantum mechanics
- Lie algebra cohomology – physicist’s version
- Lie algebra cohomology
- Lie algebra cohomology for semi-simple Lie algebras
- Highest weight theory
- BRST news
- Casimir operators
- The Harish-Chandra homomorphism
Peter, although it seems that you do hate string theory , I think, you are ultimately on our side, because publishing 1-8 you did show your weakness – deeply in your heart you do adore physics behind gauge theories If one is allowed to ask you for a Christmas gift, then my wish is that you discuss Kugo-Ojima criterion of confinement. And could you also kindly add me to your blogroll?
Although Lubos did start to prefer discussing politics and future Obama’s advisors to physics (or is it a question of traffic? ), he also recently posted a couple of really nice things like
- CKM matrix from F-theory
- Cyclic cosmology – motivation still unknown
- Black hole singularities in AdS/CFT
- Background independence in AdS spaces
Ultimately, I feel (or is it just my wishful thinking? ) that Lubos will comment on physics at NEQNET more and more, while Reference Frame will ultimately become the blog about politics. And then they will make him the youngest Czech president, although he does not want the job
Lubos, my Christmas wish to you is the following: one of your commentators (SlavaM – Slava Mukhanov, by a chance? ) has asked you to review two papers on interplay between BH and hydrodynamics – arXiv:0811.2305 and arXiv:0811.2381. Could you indeed kindly take a quick look on them?
Jester just moved from CERN to New Jersey but luckily did not loose his sense of humor. He also has found time to publish a couple of really great reviews on anomalies in high energy particle physics that recently got so much attention:
- Hitchhiker’s guide to anomalies in astroparticle physics
- ATIC ATAC
- Hitchhiker’s guide to ghosts and spooks in particle physics
Jester, my Christmas wish for you is the Hitchhiker’s guide to anomalies in quantum chromodynamics spectroscopy (although I do understand that this is not your area of expertise – but it is so much fun to extend your area of expertise!) And of course, could you please add me to your “Brothers and sisters” list?
Dear Jacques, sorry for being so breathtakingly rude, but you do exactly the kind of thing which makes Bee thinking that blogosphere was killed by capitalist pigs – you do not publish on your blog! There was nothing related to physics since September 22, when you have discussed
in the great post about old Intrilligator-Seiberg and de Boer et al. papers. You said that there will be another post explaining how those papers are related to the recent Braden, Licata and Webster paper, but there wasn’t any. Note that my daughter was born on September 24, and I thought – it would be so nice if she learns a bit of string theory before she starts walking, but… what a big disappointment for her (kindly see the picture above).
My only Christmas wish to you as a virtual Santa Klaus is: don’t take it as offense, but would you kindly blog a little more often? Surely, blogging may loose its taste after you blogged for a while, but the nicest thing of being a blogger is curious newcomers are always there to knock your door. And that’s what I am doing right now.
Although the number of physics related posts at CV does not really impress taking into account that the blog is collective creation, there were some recent pearls
- Unsolicited advice VIII. Make your integrals dimensionless (Are you by a chance an undergraduate student? Then, by all means, take a look at this post.)
- Dark energy – no longer a surprise (As if it were suprise to anybody… well… except string theorists.)
- Thanksgiving (the spin-statistics theorem was very properly thanked this year)
Dear collective mind of the CV, I was thinking and thinking… What is the Christmas with I would like to ask you? I have no idea. Be always as fun to read as you are now.
Tommaso Dorrigo has recently published an enormous amount of almost insider-like info about CDF anomaly and other results related to lepton jets observed at CDF. I actually would like to claim that Tomaso’s blog is currently the most physics oriented blog in the blogosphere (the claim is based on the number of physics related posts ). Here you go:
- Result now, explanation later
- Arkani-Hamed: Dark forces, smoking guns and lepton jets at the LHC
- Top quark mass measured with neutrino phi weighting
- More ridiculously rare charmless decays from Belle
- Ridiculous branching fractions nailed
Tommaso, my only Christmas wish to you is that you stop calling yourself Brown Muck at any possible occasion (especially during events featuring Nima Arkani-Hamed) - nick names do tend to be associated with real persons (especially, after so many repetitions). As Guru Pitka (that is, Love Guru) teaches us – it’s Ok if somebody says bad things about you, but why do you say bad things about yourself?
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF YOU!!!
Did I forget to write about your blog? Please, kindly let me know. And be sure that I am also ready to become a blogging Santa for a moment and hear your Christmas wishes
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Merry Christmas Dmitry!
Happy to add you to my blogroll.
I didn’t think the fact that I adore the physics (and mathematics) behind gauge theories was much of a secret, or a weakness.
The new point of view on BRST that I’m trying to explain may or may not ever end up having anything to say about confinement, I really don’t know. Personally I’m more interested in seeing whether it has anything to say about the electroweak sector…
Hi Peter
Thanks so much for dropping by and for the link!
It was just a Xmas joke
I was just thinking that maybe, if you discuss BRST anyway, you will want to mention Kugo and Ojima work on BRST, and if you will – then there is just one step to their confinement criterion.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
hi Dima
Merry Xmas to you, you daughter and wife! My wish is that you finally present a correct answer to the poll about chromoelectric flux tube
cheers
Hi Dmitry, Merry Christmas!
My crashes may have been caused by the dust under my CPU fan – by removing it on Friday afternoon, the stable temperature dropped by 10+ deg C which might have been enough to avoid blue screens of death and freezes for 2+ days, and maybe for years to follow.
I will see whether it makes sense to write the answer to these information-loss-issues again.
Whatever will happen, you should certainly feel that people – at least myself – are surely interested in your further progress that will hopefully survive deeper checks than what I’ve seen so far.
Wow, was it my dummy tail at http://capitalistimperialistpig.blogspot.com/ who killed the blogosphere?
Whoever it was, I find all these hypotheses bizarre.
Blogosphere is clearly not the ultimate mean of communication that was supposed (by sensible people) to control the world in an unchanged form for millenia (it was rather a fashionable trend that may have peaked in 2006 or so), so its influence is obviously going to be suppressed by competing new and old, more technological or less technological channels. On the other hand, it’s surely not going to entirely disappear, much like books or TVs have not disappeared, despite prophets who have predicted otherwise.
Concerning your celebration of the Russian think tanks, well, Russia is a pretty cultural nation of 140 million and the topics you mention are pretty standard topics that a large fraction of the educated population cares about. So it’s not shocking to find some good and intense stuff and collaboration. Of course that it’s harder with (serious) cosmology or string theory. I estimate the number of Russians who are sufficiently familiar with string theory not to write complete rubbish to be 200, and only roughly 2% of them care about the Internet, like to write, and debate. So with these 4- people, you won’t get hundreds of people in similar threads, sorry.
Concerning the AdS/H2O duality
, it’s cool but I am not the ideal person to discuss papers in this direction, especially not those that I don’t find to be “quite the pioneering ones” (unless I misunderstand something; I feel that the papers by Minwalla et al. and others are more important).
These things surely do work to some extent (and many phase transitions can be connected on both sides) but I don’t understand the statements of some of the proponents that it is an exact duality. I don’t have a feeling that they discuss fully defined theories on both sides. Here I am not talking about “academically” incomplete well-definedness at the level of non-perturbative type IIB string theory on RR backgrounds. I mean ill-definedness at the level of not knowing how many supercharges and massless fields there are.
It might be much more interesting to hear the voices of the people who have worked on closely related issues, including Moshe Rozali or Clifford Johnson. On the other hand, it might fail to be interesting because of their fuzzy “polite” approach to anything.
Concerning PW, well, I surely didn’t know that by his copying of the boring textbook material on the BRST formalism that no one reads, he was trying to do research that will be viewed as original by other people. Instead, it looked to me that the man was trying to create the (completely wrong) feeling that PW had something to do with real technical physics of maths which is of course extremely far from the real world.
I suspect that this boring, old, rudimentary material from the mediocre computer administrator will only be viewed as original stuff in the future by someone else if our Universe is described by a cyclic cosmological model.
The idea that physics is waiting to learn some new important things about the “proper” electroweak sector of the Standard Model sounds utterly ludicrous to me. It seems that PW is confusing 2008 with 1975 if not 1962. If a layman in discipline finds the very definition of gauge theory or the BRST formalism or the spinors mysterious in 2008, he should still realize that it doesn’t mean that bright grad students feel the same mystery: the mystery could be caused by a severe, brutal brain limitation of PW which is the case, after all.
Merry Christmas again,
Lubos
Dear Lubos
For years???? Don’t you have a natural desire (as all sensible human being do) to buy a new PC once in a couple of years?
Ok, thanks for the encouragement
It seems, you missed my point completely
I said “thousands of people collecting hundreds of comments per post” (take a look at LJ of this guy for example, not among the most famous ones). Russian LJ sector did become one big nasty machine and proved in principle that the blogosphere is a working model. Then, again, I don’t need to discuss string theory with Russians only, there are Czechs around 
and even people from Kazakhstan (see comments in the post about Dienes-Thomas paper 
)
As for AdS/H20, I certainly think that you have much more to say about it than I do. If nobody is going to pick up topic, then eventually I’ll feel – I will have to take it. Do you really want me to do that??
Love to read how you fight with Peter
Cheers,
Dmitry.
Dear Dmitry,
I wrote “years to follow” which means “years in the future”. My desktop PC is from Summer 2007, with a new GPU and extra memory added during the time.
But it is true that my only laptop at this moment is actually from late 2001
and this age gives it a special degree of reliability. You know, that’s the conservative, faithful nature.
If you want to make me more progressive and increase my computer promiscuity, I will happily accept a gift of a new laptop from you! Duo processor or more, and GeForce 9600 or more is welcome.
LJ Russia is suddenly a “nasty” machine? I will probably need a review of all your statements that avoids any irony because I have probably got lost in it.
AdS/H2O described from you would be great! And your indication that you enjoy watching violence will be ignored now.
Best wishes
Lubos
Go and find some job, you lazy …!
I thought nobody will notice that, cheers
Yes, nasty, because this thinking tank produces rather strange thoughts, too often rolling around various conspiracy theories. Maybe, this is in national character.
And I believe any single statement of mine contains some amount of irony
Yeah, now I am supposed to read those papers myself, without a friend’s hand.
Cheers,
Dmitry.