LC2011 -- aside

Bastard.

I'll return to this when sobre.

LC2011: day 1.

Talks begin at 9am. At 9:11am the first mobile phone rings and the first person is asleep.

The conference begins with a five year old, rather too hype-filled discussion of Ads/cft/qcd and the wonderful things you can do by wrapping branes about each other. He is pleasingly honest in admitting that AdS/CFT has taught us nothing about real QCD.

Coffee and doughnuts! No-one speaks to me.

The second speaker begins with a sycophantic eulogy to Stan Brodsky, who is actually in the audience. Stan responds in kind. This goes on for several minutes. Just before the tears start to fall the speaker gets to his outline. It is 15 items long. The slides are almost blacked out with text. We have here yet another 50 year old physicist who can't write a talk. I die a little.

The morning session deteriorates into a bunch of wrinkly old sods cheerfully slapping eachother on the back. I vomit a little.

The topic of the day is AdS/QCD using lightfront approaches, in particular soft wall vs. hard wall models. There are, interestingly, several agressive questions from the audience about the physical relevance of all this research. In particular how the approach deals with stuff like the angular momentum of the proton, which it seems is something we should care and worry about. The answer to all such questions is simply "we'll probably be able to do it..."

Speakers begin to leave the conference entire.

There is some more simpering praise for various elderly physicists. Someone is annoyed that scalar fields are being used to model coloured particles. He interrupts with "I don't mean to interrupt but..." which is an arse-clenchingly irritating thing to say.

Advice: if your outline takes more than 30 seconds to present, it's not a fucking outline.

What astonishes, impresses and depresses me is that people can listen to all this badly presented complex crap and ask clever pointed questions about it, even if they admit they don't understand it. How do they do that? I am literally switched off.

Some people say some sensible things about confinement. It's all based on instantons and merons, it seems. Clearly I don't understand instantons in euclidean theories, because he's reduced his entire configuration space (of gauge fields) to just these configurations and says that does everything. Apparently the YM vacuum is a liquid crystal. That's nice.

Trousers which go up to the ribs. Astounding. I am eating way too many doughnuts.

LC2011: day 0.

I arrive in the US to be greeted by a long cue leading to a sign which promises me the immigration official will be corteous and professional, and then an immigration official who is rude and indifferent.

Then six hours of my life happen in Newark airport.

Then I arrive in Texas and am lied to and fleeced by some cunt of a taxi driver.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnyway. LC211 reception: decent snack food, free wine, immediate talk of physics amongst almost everyone, talk which turns to, yup, politics after a few glasses of the Pino Broncho. Cue slightly raised voices about whether killing Osama was a wonderful thing (angry russian) or something which will only heighen both resentment and fear of the US around the world (mild european chap).

The people I want to talk to about physics during the week are here. I'm still unhappy with my talk but I have time to fix it. Now, tea... talks begin soon...

arXiv moderation

I submitted a paper to the arXiv the other day, and when it appeared I noticed the moderators had cross-listed it to some ridiculous pissant arXiv which I don't give a rat's ass about.

What's the problem? Clearly I get (a modicum) of extra publicity by cross-listing, so I should probably be indifferent to this. But I'm not. I think there are two reasons.

First, I suppose that every other physicist is a bit like me in how they see the arXiv. People who publish on hep-th sneer at people who publish on hep-ph, people on hep-ph sneer at those who publish on hep-ex, etc, so that people who work on the same area of me will think my paper is shit since I linked it to a shit arXiv.

Actually, I imagine everyone who publishes on hep-th sneers at everyone else, and I know that everyone, even passing marsupials who are mysteriously and briefly granted he understanding of science by a pissed up blue fairy and who happen to wander onto the arXiv while googling for "really good grubs to eat", sneer at physics.pop-ph.

Although I did just find this:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2263

Genius.

The second reason, and this is the real one, is that it's sodding well rude to reclassify an article and not tell the author. I can't abide these pissing up the wall contests with other physicists, and that is precisely what arXiv moderation is. Some high-up with a "I've got more citations than you" attitude can do what he/she likes with your paper and they know it.

If these people had an ounce of humility or just base gregariousness left in their citation-hunting blasted souls, they would fire off a fucking e-mail and say "hello, we'd like to cross list your paper. Please respond before the next deadline if there's a problem."

If I had received such an e-mail I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Yes, I would still have been doubtful about the necessity of cross-listing my paper to physics.yawn but I wouldn't have objected actively to it, and I wouldn't have become this irate.

Cannot stand impoliteness.

Conference blogging: LC2011

I'll be blogging from LightCone 2011 next week. For those who don't know about this conference, it's a pleasant enough event where a lot of people who work on very different topics get together and try to sell their stuff to disparate communities by saying, at some point in their alloted 30 mins, "which we can do in lightcone co-ordinates as so..."

There are also a hardcore bunch working on the very old, very hard, still unresolved, problems of lightfront field theory proper. Last year the conference was somewhat tediously dominated by Schwinger Dyson people (few of whom even pretended to care about the lightfront - shocking!) but that was due to the location and the organising commitee. Since we're on the home turf of the lightfront bigshots this year (the US), I expect a great deal of ADS/QCD stuff.

Oh yes, and it's in Dallas, Texas. Embolism alert... packing prozac now...

Your desk? It went out with SUSY.

Having just had my grant application rejected, I am in a slightly contemplative mood. The rejection is more annoying than anything else, for two reasons. First, because I now can't hire someone to take the load off, and second because it means I have to spend more time applying for other grants this year.

So, the future. Promise lurks on the horizon. It lurks like a huge shadowy something which could be an awesome uber-pancake covered in yummmy job-jam, but could also be the unemployment squid, its many tentacles flicking over the land, picking off postdocs and professors alike.

The deciding factor between pancake and cephalopod is the LHC. Theoretical physics is in a state. Despite the velociraptuous support from the higher ups, a lot of modern theoretical physics is not science. (As I've posted before, some explain this away by saying that "Modern physics has nothing to do with the Marxist definition of science". I'll let you ponder that one while I get back to the point.) The multiverse is not science, the anthropic principle is not science, and the SUSY apologists' escape route, that it can always be shoved up to higher energies, is worryingly reminiscent of something which isn't science.

Saying any experimental result, or lack thereof, can be shuffled into another part of the multiverse, preserving the sanctity of The String, is not science. I'm not going to bash string theory, I think it's a cool idea, but arguing that the multiverse is the only possible option just because strings led us there is very lazy, and dangerous, thinking.

I think I'm drifting. The point is, if the LHC finds nothing, high energy physics is going to be in trouble, and jobs are going to be even more scarce than they are now. But this is obvious to everyone involved. So why am I mentioning it.... if I had a point it has escaped me. Sorry.

Oooh, waffles....

The LHC - a big magnifying glass.

The Guardian explains why we haven't found the Higgs yet. Apparently the reason is that it is very, very small.