Greetings from Los Angeles

Part of the spectacular quad at UCLA.

Dear Big Brother

As you know, I will shortly be attending and speaking at a conference in Europe, where I will head to from Los Angeles during the first week of July.

In such situations, experienced witches have a pretty good idea what your plans are, Big Brother. So don’t bother. I am not cooperating. I deserve to work on my own research. Everyone is watching you. Just sit back and relax, and watch the show. It should be fun.

Theory conference

Quantum Inertia Update

Good news! McCulloch, who has published numerous papers on quantum inertia, is slowly gaining funding to engineer the future, having come up with his first million or two. Keep up the good work, Mike!

Physics from the edge

Amplitudes at SLAC

SLAC have been great hosts this week, for the Amplitudes2018 conference in the Kavli building. Yesterday we were treated to a tour of the campus, including a peek at the operating LSST camera facility. As seems to be usual in California, the weather was perfect: warm, with a soft breeze and bright blue sky. A big thank you to Maria, the conference organiser, who had everything running smoothly and was extremely helpful. Luckily, free food was in plentiful supply. Find Wally in the photo.

Many of you are clearly wondering what I’m doing here, since I remain homeless, poor and jobless. But I did pretty much invent the subject, with all those talks on operads and particle physics back in 2005 and 2006. So I thought I should come along and see what the community is up to these days. Did they remember me? Hard to say. Zvi Bern gave a funny speech at the conference dinner, about the old days, when nobody cared what he was doing. I did not speak to Arkani-Hamed, who only popped in briefly to give a talk. I did tell a few young people a bit about the real history of the subject, but I can see it was a stretch for them to believe that version.

As for the future, we will be seeing a lot more of the motivic methods from a category theoretic perspective. Stay tuned.

To be a sterile or not

A global fit in the 3+1 scenario from earlier this year still favours a new state at around 1eV, even ignoring LSND and the reactor data. But the new MiniBooNE result claims to rule out such a ‘large’ mass, while confirming LSND. So we can expect future global fits to confirm anomalies, but is it a sterile, and if so, what exactly is the mass squared? Do we have to throw out both LSND and MiniBooNE, and settle for a global fit without them? 

arxiv paper

Amplitudes 2018

SLAC has been a friendly host for the conference this week. Slides for the talks are now available online.

Slides and program

Orwell persists

Apple just deleted hundreds of perfectly respectable academic papers from iBooks, again.

Good Morning SLAC

Travels 2

Greetings from Palo Alto, California! My first time here, and I’m all ready for a fun conference at SLAC this week. It could be suburbia anywhere, but you don’t visit many places with companies called Matroid and a shampoo named Matrix.

Amplitudes 2018

Travels

That’s the fifth time I’ve crossed the equator this year already!