The LHC is coming, and it’s time to place your bets. What do you do? (Fun though it may be, shooting the hostage doesn’t really help here.) We’re committed Bayesians (for the sake of this post, at least), and we want to assign a probability that the LHC will see supersymmetry. More generally, we have […]
Month: August 2007
Saiko no Densha
(I think that’s right– we’re drifting into phrasebook stuff, here…) Another day of tourism, another golf shirt with visible salt crystals from dried sweat. Did I mention that it’s really frickin’ hot? Today was a split day– we spent the morning looking at temples near the Kyoto station, and after lunch took a train down […]
New York in August
I’m here at the Simons Workshop at Stony Brook out on Long Island. I’d like to talk a bit about the workshop later, but right now I just want to note that it is 56 degrees out. In New York. In the middle of August. Thunderstorms I’d understand, but cold, dreary drizzle? It’s August, not […]
Twisty Little Universes, All Alike
When we left our story, we were stuck in the unfortunate position of living somewhere in a multiverse without any a priori way to figure out where we live. What might we do?
Ask a String Theorist: Update
Thanx to everyone for all the interesting questions in the previous thread. I apologize for not being able to answer every one of them. I just arrived at a workshop on Long Island, and I’m also feeling a bit under the weather. From what I’ve seen so far, I think I will do a post […]
Sugoi Atsui Desu
My rudimentary Japanese will run out much too fast for me to keep up the conceit of titling all travel updates in Japanese, but we’ll run with it while we can… I don’t know if there’s a Japanese equivalent of “It’sãnot the heat, it’s the humidity,” so we’ll just go with this. When I told […]
The Lay of the Landscape
Let’s say you have a theory, and, let’s say it happens to have a whole lot of solutions. Maybe it’s the theory you’re thinking about, but it doesn’t have to be. Nothing of what I’m going to say depends on any details besides this surfeit of solutions.
The Multiverse: An Apology
When Chad first asked me to guest blog here, my first response was that I didn’t have anything to say. After a little thought, however, it occurred to me that this would be an opportunity to do a little exposition. Unfortunately, my research area is quite a bit on the esoteric side, so I had […]
Yoroshiku Onegai Shimasu
I’m sure I’m neither the first nor the last person to note that it probably says something about Japan that the ordinary meet-new-people ritual includes asking them “Please be kind to me.” But, you know, sometimes you have to be obvious. Anyway, I’m in Kyoto, typing on a loaner laptop in the hotel lobby. Don’t […]
Sigh
I see below that (in what comes as a total surprise) the string thread has already gotten lively. As an experimentalist doing quantum mechanics at the ultra-low-energy end, I don’t have a strong opinion on string theory qua theory, and I really don’t have a strong opinion on the sociology-of-theory business, beyond saying that I’m […]