Do you think this year's string conference solved anything

[ftr]

I just found out about the lectures, are there any interesting or profound ones.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFeW8O-DWElfT436yuivT6g/videos

 

[arivero]

Well, a very exciting thing is that they are evolving from amplitudes and conformal theories to the S-Matrix Bootstrap itself. This is a very interesting change of perspective because it means to try to find special sets of parameters. Opposite to the trend of keep finding more and more vacuum exponentially.

 

[Vanadium 50]

"Hey, here are 32 hours of videos! Please watch them and tell me which ones are worth watching"

Seriously, do you think anyone is going to do that?

 

[ftr]

"Hey, here are 32 hours of videos! Please watch them and tell me which ones are worth watching"

Seriously, do you think anyone is going to do that?

No, but I just thought those who know some string might pick up on one theme that they are familiar with which has a promising material.

 

[arivero]

No, but I just thought those who know some string might pick up on one theme that they are familiar with which has a promising material.

Well, in that sense, no surprises AFAIK. Not the n-th supersting revolution coming; in the age of the revolutions the reaction was almost immediate after a lecture.

 

[haushofer]

I've learned there should be more women in science.

 

[arivero]

I've learned there should be more women in science.

Yep, is about pooling a reservoir of intelligence that has remained almost untapped.

 

[Demystifier]

I've learned there should be more women in science.

If there should be more woman in science, then there should be less woman in something else. Did you also learned what that something else is?

 

[arivero]

If there should be more woman in science, then there should be less woman in something else. Did you also learned what that something else is?

Not from the talk, as that is general politics and they tried to avoid it. In general politics, I would start looking niches where more than 75% workers are woman and adding men there. Even the "untapped reservoir" argument was only insinuated, but it is a sort of answer: you get them from someplace where their IQ is not been fully used.

There was some history I heard in Cambridge about the creation of the first feminine college -which, btw, has a nice pool inside- , and how the first evaluations shown a sensible difference of scores ahead of the rest of, not mixed, colleges. The analysis then was obvious: all the other colleges were in hard competition for the best male students of the country, while the unique feminine college has a monopoly.

 

[Demystifier]

I would start looking niches where more than 75% workers are woman and adding men there.

Why would you add more men there? Why do you think that an optimal distribution of men and women is a uniform one?

Furthermore, is sex the only characteristic that should be uniform? For instance, suppose that someone told you that people with blood group A more often choose physics than people with blood group B. Would you then argue that there should be more blood group B people in physics?

 

[arivero]

Why would you add more men there? Why do you think that an optimal distribution of men and women is a uniform one?

Furthermore, is sex the only characteristic that should be uniform? For instance, suppose that someone told you that people with blood group A more often choose physics than people with blood group B. Would you then argue that there should be more blood group B people in physics?

Note that this thread is OT, and general politics is definitely OT, so while I am interested on the topic of equality vs efficiency, I will not address the first question for general jobs or tasks. For physics particularly, it is not about equality but about rightly pooling the intelligence reservoirs. So in principle yes, if we have a variable, as blood group, that happens to be statistically underrepresented, say five sigmas away, then an issue is happening.

Of course it could be that the issue is happening out of the reach of physicists. Say that some blood group is not being taught enough math due to whatever world geopolitics. But we can establish a baseline about having enough math, say the first year in university, or the number of graduates. If distributions change respect to this baseline, something is going wrong and we are leaking brain power. Note that the talk rightly concentrated in this "pipeline" problem. You are right that not only the male/female distribution, but also other ones (nationality, family income, etc) should be checked. Do we miss people because their fathers have a company and claim them to executive posts? Do we miss people because their families are poor and they need to move to stable work? Do we miss people because of their origin nationality?

Unfortunately, the finer you make the division, the most difficult to get enough statistics. We could check if the distribution of first letter is preserved along the pipeline, and in fact we could suspect that names with early position in the alphabet are favored. But to detect this bias we would surely need a lot more of sample size that the current number of graduating physicists (well, if the hypothesis is about first letter, and not about some letter, we can use distance to AAA instead of partitioning in 28 cases... hmm perhaps it was not a so good example of impossibility).

 

[jedishrfu]

Hey Folks,

Let's get back on topic of discussing the OP's first post concerning the String conference before we go solving the world's inequity problems.

Jedi

 

[haushofer]

If there should be more woman in science, then there should be less woman in something else. Did you also learned what that something else is?

Why? Which symmetry gives conservation of women? :P

Sorry Jedishrfu, I'll be nice now :P

 

[arivero]

discussing the OP's first post

Yep, it is a bit dishonest to concentrate in the less polemical issue. Let's go back to string wars.

I, for one, welcome all the boostrap talks. Still they are not enough to recover the role of string theory as a theory of the scattering of mesons and fermions, but well, jointly with the talks on amplitudes, they are interesting takes on the use of string theory.

 

[arivero]

what do you think of the talks on computer/lattice calculations?

 

[Urs Schreiber]

There is still StringMath 2017 in two weeks.