Quantum Gravity Testing: A Collaborative Approach

[marcus]

Bee has organized an informal working and discussion group at Perimeter
for people researching ways to empirically test QG ideas

they found a room where they can meet Tuesday afternoons, and part of organizing the group was to set up a BLOG,
http://qglab.blogspot.com/
which she says is only for topic-related discussion. More chatty wide-ranging comment belongs at her and Stefan personal blog "backreaction", she says.

this all seems energetic generous and sensible. I have no urge to post comment at this technical utility blog (named "Quantum Gravity in the Lab?!" note punctuation) but I am glad that it is open for us to read as a window looking in at that research line.

 

[marcus]

a thing about Bee is that she writes extremely well and this gives whatever she does extra clout, for example:

The reason for me setting up the discussion group was that even for those who are smart enough not to work on it, quantum gravity is the holy grail of theoretical physics in the 21st century. And here we are, standing on the shoulders of giants, trying to make a step without falling down. Luckily, over the last decade, we were able to move the giants a bit, and it's become quite fashionable to work on not derived, but well motivated models that incorporate the one or the other feature of the pursued full theory: like a minimal length scale, extra dimensions, modified dispersion relations, decoherence in a Planck-scale foamy background etc.

you really can't stop someone who writes this well. their style gives them extra momentum. it's a good thing too.

this was from a February post called "First meeting"
http://qglab.blogspot.com/2007/02/first-meeting.html

 

[marcus]

another thing is communicating graphically
even with this starkly functional block diagram
http://qglab.blogspot.com/2007/03/inverse-problem.html

not decorative but helps keep mindful of relations between Theories, effective models, derived phenomenology and observational testing

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prettier graphic illustrations, for comparison, are in the 21 March backreaction post here
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/03/science-and-democracy-iii.html
or the blog posts tagged "humor"
==============

About the theme of the discussion group, Quantum Gravity in the Lab?!,
I liked the 21 March arxiv posting by Magueijo and Singh
http://arxiv.org/astro-ph/0703566
Thermal fluctuations in loop cosmology
wonder if what they discuss in that paper will ever materialize in Bee's discussion group