Loops '07 has slides for the talks (some audio as well)

[marcus]

http://www.matmor.unam.mx/eventos/loops07/

click on "program"

 

[marcus]

I downloaded slides for 30 talks---a lot of the presenters made their slides coherent and explicit enough to follow without the audio.
I picked around 10 of the invited plenary talks and 20 of the contributed.
The contributed, by the younger people mostly, were often impressive.

If you check out any of the talks slides and have a comment or a pointer to, like, page 6 of Kevin Vandersloot's talk where he says something especially interesting, please add it to this thread.

I will pick out a few things as I read thru the talks.

 

[ensabah6]

I downloaded slides for 30 talks---a lot of the presenters made their slides coherent and explicit enough to follow without the audio.
I picked around 10 of the invited plenary talks and 20 of the contributed.
The contributed, by the younger people mostly, were often impressive.

If you check out any of the talks slides and have a comment or a pointer to, like, page 6 of Kevin Vandersloot's talk where he says something especially interesting, please add it to this thread.

I will pick out a few things as I read thru the talks.

Which slide do you think represents the most fruitful direction for loop community?

Personally, I like Daniele Oriti's idea of applying condense matter physics principles to LQG with references to Volvovik's work. I also like Smolin's preon braiding idea.

It doesn't seem to me there were any talks, by Andrew Randanomo or Eyo Ita, on current research into the Kodama wavefunction in LQG.

 

[marcus]

...

It doesn't seem to me there were any talks, by Andrew Randono .. on current research into the Kodama wavefunction in LQG.

check out the slides of Andy's talk

"A New Perspective on
Covariant Canonical Gravity"

concise and innovative---develops his own version of the K. state.
mathematically deeper than before, takes more risk (just my immediate impression)

the young crop of people, like Johannes Tambornino, Bianca Dittrich, this guy,..
the field is attracting serious talent

 

[marcus]

Which [sets of slides] do you think represents the most fruitful direction for loop community?

the field is "lasing" (stimulated emission of good work)
so we are seeing the advance of coherent wavefronts of research

check out the SUPERCOMPUTER bunch
David Rideout's plenary talk
contributed talks by
Dan Christensen
and by people in Dan Christensen's group:
Wade Cherrington
Igor Khavkine
Josh Willis

as far back as Johannes Kepler, calculation has LED to new formulas. you calculate a lot first and then comes analytic insight, and you get something that could have have been found with pencil and paper but somehow eluded earlier theorists, so that's a good thing to be pursuing.

(Ashtekar and Bojowald's cosmology groups have also been running numerical models)

 

[marcus]

I didnt mean to suggest that computer numerical was the only thing happening, I just mentioned it as an important cluster of people and activity.

You ask about "most fruitful direction" and actually I don't see that as our job.

As a BYSTANDER we can gauge the mass and momentum of a certain research drive. With some technical experience one can also hope to sense the intellectual caliber of some of the people---what matters is the quality of the NEW people that you didnt know their names last year or the year before.
Acceleration is based on the quality and originality of the new people entering the field. There are a lot of new ones just now.

I feel comfortable trying to guess which of several papers might have the most research impact, but that is papers. A paper is a single finite thing. "Directions" are more abstract and harder for me to size up.

Just talking about the mass and momentum of some line of research----if you look at the talks and sample the slides you can see two important GROUPS which are snowballing. People are joining Rovelli's effort to get spinfoam right. there are a halfdozen new young people there: Engle, Bianchi, Fairbairn, Pereira, Alesci...
Of course that is a very crucial important effort---if they can get it right then the whole Loop field is on solid footing---and they just got Newtons law, and graviton propagator, and n-point scatter functions, and special cases of good classical limit etc.---signs are positive.

And then the Bojo-Ashtekar group in quantum cosmology has a lot of new volunteers. Let me list, some will have been around longer but a lot of us didnt notice until now...

Kagan
Hossain
Skirzewski
Hernandez
Mulryne
Nunes
Shankaranarayanan

Also Parampreet Singh has been working with both Ashtekar and Bojowald for 3-4 years now so he's almost "senior". I am just listing
the comparatively new guys. I guess you have to study how to pronounce that long name, say Shankar, like "Ravi Shankar" the musician.
and say Nara-yanan.
and then put it together and say it fast
Shankara Narayanan
Shankaranaryanan.

It gets easier after the 2nd or 3rd time.

Anyway Bojowald has a pipeline tapped into a source of talent---he has Hermann Nicolai and Thomas Thiemann of the Albert Einstein Institute Potsdam sending him people---or so I think. And he probably gets some recruiting help from Kastrup at Aachen Tech. Some how he is taking on new people.

=============

Lee Smolin also has an impressive and growing group, and there one very obvious magnet is the Perimeter Institute environment itself which I think Lee has been an essential factor in creating.