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Polchinski: "2006, the Year in Strings"
Joseph Polchinski gave a well attended plenary lecture titled:
Polchinski: "2006, the Year in Strings"
http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/indico/contributionDisplay.py?contribId=746&sessionId=25&confId=3
The above link gives the slides. I found several parts of it interesting. First, I thought that getting string theory as the limit of a mesh of Feynman diagrams was cool. And he talked quite a bit about 5-D theories. This is personally interesting because I use 5-dimensional space-time in my internal papers, with the 5th dimension being related to proper time (this is known as "Euclidean relativity", and by many other names and I am not the only heretic involved with the travesty).
And then he talked about the landscape and the anthropic principle. He said that the inflation scale is smaller than the Planck scale by at least a factor of 10^4, and this was of great interest to me. I've toyed around with trying to explain inflation by having preons that travel faster than c and have Planck scale masses. So one wonders how one would make the calculation and perhaps predict the exact value of the inflation scale from the Planck mass and Clifford algebra.
There were two questions. The first was a request to comment on Susskind's alleged suggestion that we could be at the end of physics in that we are at the "end of the reductionist paradigm". The speaker wisely avoided commenting on Susskind, but said he himself does not have a paradigm, and that serious cosmologists have been worrying about this for >30 years, that is, what is it that allows life.
The second question was about the abilitiy of a large extra dimension allowing solving of the hierarchy problem. He speculated that maybe someone in the audience knew the answer to this but he didn't call on me by name (LOL), and mentioned the embedding of 5-D theories in 10-D.
It was a nice lecture.
Carl
Joseph Polchinski gave a well attended plenary lecture titled:
Polchinski: "2006, the Year in Strings"
http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/indico/contributionDisplay.py?contribId=746&sessionId=25&confId=3
The above link gives the slides. I found several parts of it interesting. First, I thought that getting string theory as the limit of a mesh of Feynman diagrams was cool. And he talked quite a bit about 5-D theories. This is personally interesting because I use 5-dimensional space-time in my internal papers, with the 5th dimension being related to proper time (this is known as "Euclidean relativity", and by many other names and I am not the only heretic involved with the travesty).
And then he talked about the landscape and the anthropic principle. He said that the inflation scale is smaller than the Planck scale by at least a factor of 10^4, and this was of great interest to me. I've toyed around with trying to explain inflation by having preons that travel faster than c and have Planck scale masses. So one wonders how one would make the calculation and perhaps predict the exact value of the inflation scale from the Planck mass and Clifford algebra.
There were two questions. The first was a request to comment on Susskind's alleged suggestion that we could be at the end of physics in that we are at the "end of the reductionist paradigm". The speaker wisely avoided commenting on Susskind, but said he himself does not have a paradigm, and that serious cosmologists have been worrying about this for >30 years, that is, what is it that allows life.
The second question was about the abilitiy of a large extra dimension allowing solving of the hierarchy problem. He speculated that maybe someone in the audience knew the answer to this but he didn't call on me by name (LOL), and mentioned the embedding of 5-D theories in 10-D.
It was a nice lecture.
Carl