Recent posts
164. Physics Model
Physics is a strange, secular mistress who spends her time with concepts and with laws. These she embellishes with equations, and revisions are made (some with distress) oft’ to include experimental flaws which lead to whole other realizations. She makes Order’s bed and goes off to War – very constant is her uncertainty – her [...]
163. What is AdS/QCD?
This is a a guest post by Josh Erlich from the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg. Dmitry. This is a summary of AdS/QCD based on a recent review talk I gave at the Confinement 8 conference in Mainz, Germany. For more details and a list of references, the talk is posted on the arxiv [...]
162. Five most important things that happened to me in 2008
This post number 161 is the last one that I write in the year 2008 as it passes away and waves us his hand. What did it bring to my life? Agata was born – my little, lovely, hyperactive, noisy, extremely creative and restless daughter was born in the end of September, and my life [...]
161. Survival of the witless
When fire, water, earth and air were thought to be the elementals that composed all matter, folks did not become distraught at what avant-garde chemists then proposed. Most understand that the Earth is a sphere (with only one natural satellite); no matter where folks sail they do not fear they’ll reach the edge and fall [...]
160. Quantitative analysis for beginners. Dumb Gaussian approximation
Back in Munich, when we were discussing the crisis (apart from so many other things ) with Serge Winitzki, he eventually stated that the crisis’ takeoff is ultimately related to the ignorance of financial analysts – namely, they ignore the fact that rare (in the sense of Gaussian statistics) events are not that rare [...]
159. San Grail? Sangria?
From humblest manger beginnings, He grew a wit to teach the Temple’s teachers, but in His age, the sad reality: The world was rife with prophets and preachers. He was a novelty, a prodigy – received as well then as such are today – childlike, unsettling ‘Od’ity and Upstart Who crossed all class boundary. Until [...]
158. Young Researchers Conference at Perimeter Institute
… has finished several weeks ago, and all talks are now online at PIRSA. To my knowledge, the main purpose of the conference is to put together short listed candidates for postdoctoral positions at PI – an equivalent of interview with important difference that candidates show themselves to each other, interact with each other and accept questions [...]
157. Update on world crisis: Toyota, OPEC
A couple of recent news that have got my attention and may seem interesting for you, too: OPEC agreed to seriously cut oil output. Precisely, cartel agreed to make a record, that is, strongest in history, cut in output about 2.2 million barrels per day – that is 3% cut, am I write? Fine, what is the result? The [...]
156. Again about condensed matter applications of AdS-CFT
Peter Horava has recently released a somewhat mysterious paper about non-relativistic Yang-Mills theories. Since I was unable to understand why one should be ultimately interested to consider such exotic beasts (that is, non-relativistic YM theories), I decided to postpone the reading until understanding will eventually appear due to background work of my brain Understanding of [...]
155. Witten explains how to quantize gauge theory
Long time (almost 6 months?) ago Peter Woit wrote about Yau Birthday Conference and briefly mentioned the talk Edward Witten gave there. I was wondering is there preprint going to appear some day with outline of this talk, and it has finally appeared yesterday in ArXiv. As you can imagine after reading the title and [...]