Helpful new paper by Derek Wise

marcus

John Baez just announced some good news.
Derek is finishing is PhD thesis this spring and has gotten a postdoc job at the Math Department at UC Davis.
Baez gives this link to Derek's homepage
http://math.ucr.edu/~derek/

AFAIK UC Davis is a good place to be for Quantum Gravity. It has Steve Carlip
http://www.physics.ucdavis.edu/Text/carlip_steve.html
Carlip does a variety of kinds of research including Quantum Geometry (alias non-string QG)
His home page has a lot of links to resources about QG and GR
http://www.physics.ucdavis.edu/Text/Carlip.html

Carlip joined the UC Davis physics faculty in 1990 after a postdoc at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.

UC Berkeley has nobody of comparable stature in non-string QG, as far as I know. The only person they have of comparable note is Bousso, a string theorist. Davis is only an hour north on the freeway from Berkeley. People in more or less any department will commute back and forth for seminars and colloquium talks. Somebody should get Berkeley MSRI to have a workshop on MacDowell-Mansouri gravity and SO(4,1) Cartan geometry. Wise could commute in from Davis.

I think if you are looking on the west coast then Riverside and Davis are the best places you could be for non-string QG.
Incidentally Steve Carlip just posted two BH entropy papers on arxiv this past week.
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702107
Black Hole Thermodynamics from Euclidean Horizon Constraints
S. Carlip
4 pages

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702094
Black Hole Entropy and the Problem of Universality
Steven Carlip
10 pages; talk at DICE 2006, Piombino, Italy

marcus

I'd like to hear more about this. One of the coauthors, Jeffrey Morton, is a Baez student and the news is he's finishing his PhD and has a postdoc at University of Western Ontario (UWO)
(Dan Christensen has a joint faculty position there in math, physics, and computing---Josh Willis went there from Penn State)

Right now, if non-string QG is going to pick up momentum in the US and Canada, I'd say the most interesting places outside Penn State and Perimeter are UC Riverside, UC Davis, UWO.

I wonder if they can pull it off, to understand the representations of the Poincaré 2-group. Seems like it would make some waves.

john baez

Okay.

As soon as Derek and Jeff finish, I won't have any students pestering me to work on quantum gravity, so I'll mainly do other stuff.

My student Mike Stay is going to quit studies at UCR and work for Google, but I hope to keep working with him on category theory, logic and quantum computation. I'll only have two students left at UCR: Alex Hoffnung, who is beginning work on string theory from a 2-categorical viewpoint, and John Huerta, who is starting work on grand unified theories.

I'd like to make some particles, not just waves.

We've classified the irreps of the Poincaré group, but we were hoping to get a 4d TQFT out of it, and this is harder - we probably won't go that far in this paper.

garrett

Ah, GUTs...
The Coleman-Mandula theorem killed the idea of joining the Poincare algebra non-trivially with (Yang-Mills) internal symmetries. But ditching Poincare for De Sitter revives the idea of finding a unified Cartan Geometry / Yang-Mills GUT theory that includes gravity. Fun stuff!