Which conference lineup interests you more? (Strings '11 or mixed-QG 11)

[marcus]

Heh heh. Don't forget Phlogiston.
Or the Aether.

A few posts back I mentioned the conference attendance figure for Strings 2011. It is actually 257 (see https://www.akademikonferens.se/list.jsf?conf=strings2011-S ) so I'll correct the table.

Registered participants in the annual conference (some years omitted for brevity)

Strings 2003 Kyoto     396
Strings 2005 Toronto   415
Strings 2007 Madrid    440
Strings 2009 Rome      450
Strings 2010 Texas A&M 193
Strings 2011 Uppsala   257

Here's the main video link:
http://media.medfarm.uu.se/flvplayer/strings2011/
David Gross's opening talk provided, I think, a good window on the state of things in the string program generally, possibly also the mood.
Gross-- http://media.medfarm.uu.se/flvplayer/strings2011/video1
Frank Wilczek gave an invited talk on "three ways beyond the standard model". None were stringy. He described his approach as "bottom up" and "zero-brane". Talked mostly about his first two topics: quantitative unification and axions. To stay within time he had treat the planned third topic (portals) lightly.
Wilczek-- http://media.medfarm.uu.se/flvplayer/strings2011/video24
Wilczeck made a special point of praising Fabio Zwirner's talk, the only talk at the conference he cited or recommended. It was also not a string theory talk, actually, but was about LHC results:
Zwirner-- http://media.medfarm.uu.se/flvplayer/strings2011/video5
Verlinde's talk is tomorrow. Here's the advance copy.
Verlinde-- http://pirsa.org/11060065/

 

[marcus]

Peter Woit had an interesting Update on Strings 2011 today
==quote==
Update: After looking at most of the talks online, the most remarkable thing about Strings 2011 is how little there is about string theory. One of the speakers, Chris Hull, started off his talk with the comment:

At lunch today one of the organizers was observing that my talk was unusual in being one of the few talks actually about string theory. It would be interesting to speculate on what that might mean about the state of the field, but it would be invidious to do so here.
​

One of the main themes of the conference so far has been study of mathematically interesting supersymmetric QFTs in 3,4,5 and 6 dimensions, often obtained from a specific class of 6d theories, which themselves remain poorly understood (what is known about them was reviewed by Greg Moore). Witten gave an overview of his work relating Khovanov homology and QFT, which involves a chain of various 6d, 5d, 4d, 3d and 2d QFTs. Nati Seiberg reviewed the technology used for constructing these theories on various special backgrounds, noting that this was all about “rigid” SUSY theories, with supergravity and string theory making no appearance.
==endquote==
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3811

One can always draw some connection between whatever and something studied in the string program. So presumably one can say that this or that is "string inspired" or "guided by insights from string" if it makes people feel good. As for instance Verlinde tactfully did in the introduction to his Perimeter talk.

Anyway here is the link to Chris Hull's talk which a Strings 2011 conference organizer described as one of the few talks that was actually about string theory.
Hull-- http://media.medfarm.uu.se/flvplayer/strings2011/video16