Last Post

Kea hereby declares Arcadian Pseudofunctor closed.

Conferences Coming

Amongst the many interesting, upcoming conferences that I am unable to attend is Cosgrav 12: International Conference on Modern Perspectives of Cosmology and Gravitation. Oh, look. The invited speakers all seem to be men, yet again. Perhaps I won't be missing much.

Further away, there is Moriond in March, and a workshop on Scattering Amplitudes at Cambridge in April. Anastasia Volovich is of course the token woman there, and participation is by invitation only. Meanwhile, the icHEP12 website has a cute disclaimer:

In particular, no bona fide scientist will be excluded from participation on the grounds of national origin, nationality, or political considerations unrelated to science.

Yes, we need that qualification there, don't we?

Tevatron Strikes Back

A Fairy Update! A new CDF analysis of $10$ inverse femtobarns in the $\gamma \gamma$ channel. No fairies.

Does that $125$ GeV Higgs look a little more uncertain now? Not really, since this is at ten times the SM $\sigma$. Only CMS and ATLAS can tell us the answer.

Quote of the Month

The truth is that sustainable development is fundamentally a question of people’s opportunities to influence their future, claim their rights and voice their concerns. Democratic governance and full respect for human rights are key prerequisites for empowering people to make sustainable choices. The peoples of the world will simply not tolerate continued environmental devastation or the persistent inequality which offends deeply held universal principles of social justice. Citizens will no longer accept governments and corporations breaching their compact with them as custodians of a sustainable future for all.

From the new UN report: Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing

Quote of the Week

I'm vehemently against copyright infringement: the files I lost were created & owned by me for my job.

One of 150 million legitimate Megaupload users, whose data has been stolen and censored by the US government.

More Than Men

From the More Than Men project:

I can sense the comments coming in already. ”But Sasha,” you ask, “isn’t that just establishing quotas? Aren’t we ignoring qualified dudes because we’re stocking our conferences with woman and minority speakers?” My answer is “No, don’t be so ridiculous and offensive by assuming that trying to create a diverse group of speakers means choosing less-qualified speakers in order to have more than white men talking.

Let me say that again, very clearly: If you think that ensuring a diverse representation of genders, races, and physical abilities in your conference speakers means creating a conference stocked with unqualified “tokens” you are making a prejudiced assumption. Your internalized bias is showing. Don’t freak out, it happens to the best of us. So take a deep breath, maybe have a laugh with yourself for freaking out like that and then look a little deeper for those experts who are just too busy doing work and making a name for themselves that you haven’t heard of them yet. Or maybe you have heard of them but didn’t think of them because our brains are lazy and go for the comfortable and familiar rather than stretch a little.

Year of the Dragon

Quote of the Week

Don't take our generation lightly

Arfa Karim Randhawa (1995 - 2012)
(and at the BBC)

The Usual

As expected, the motives paper was summarily rejected by the one referee who looked at it, with some brief comments about my suspicious use of (now) trendy terms. Why this took over six months is beyond me. I also receive about one automated postdoc rejection each day at this time of year (not everyone bothers sending out rejections). I know they are automated, because they usually include a phrase like you and other excellent candidates or we considered your application carefully.

Internet Freedom

We support the Sopa protest.

Kea At Work

far away

News from Fermi

From Fermi LAT:

One example is the well-known radio galaxy NGC 1275, which is a bright, isolated source below 10 GeV. At higher energies it fades appreciably and another nearby source begins to appear. Above 100 GeV, NGC 1275 becomes undetectable by Fermi, while the new source, the radio galaxy IC 310, shines brightly.

Quote of the Month

From Woity Toity:

As usual, Arkani-Hamed makes wildly enthusiastic claims. In this case, he claims to have finally found a remarkable new understanding of the subject, based on some combinatorial objects and dramatic new mathematical ideas. He does note that this still hasn’t been written up, and that it’s the third time in the past year that he has thought he had things understood, with the last two times not working out.

Women A Mystery

It seems the biggest news of the day, around the blogs and in the press, is that Hawking said women were a complete mystery, which is not surprising for someone who never actually had to work with any women. So I scoured the bemused stories, looking for any mention of sexism or feminism, with regard to any of the parties involved, but of course to no avail. Perhaps there is one somewhere. Only in the comments sections did I find some relief. Melodie Benford summed it all up:

I find this article so freakin sexist ...

Auld Lang Syne

As Kitaev will tell you, quantum codes are about things like ribbon categories. Ribbons and knots, knots and ribbons.

Back in the mid '90s, everyone was into quantum field theories with knots. I was supposed to be working in standard lattice QCD, in a Physics department, but being enamoured of knots I instead found myself lost amongst the deserted stacks of the mathematics library, and chatting to mathematicians like Bai-Ling Wang and Alan Carey. At that time, classical geometry was still boss, and everywhere I looked there were manifolds, manifolds, manifolds. The mathematicians weren't at all bothered by all the manifolds, but as a physicist who haunted the library stacks, I was looking for something more, let's say, background independent. Alan gave me some excellent advice, and told me to work on my thesis and forget about the knots (but naturally, the advice was bound to be ignored).

Anyway, a standard gadget in the knotty manifold world was a framed knot, where one thickened a knot into a kind of twisted torus so that it sat in a nice way in a larger space. By drawing lines along the torus, one could get ribbon diagrams. For example, quantum mathematicians liked symplectic spaces, such as $T^{*}S^3$, the cotangent bundle of the three dimensional sphere $S^3$. Such a six dimensional space has three dimensional Lagrangian submanifolds, good for putting knots in, and with which mathematicians can do some knot wizardry.

In time, the trend moved towards combinatorial alternatives. The only constant was the universal obsession with knots and ribbons. Six strands for three ribbons. I could no longer afford to listen to mathematics lectures in Princeton or Canberra, and nobody was willing to supervise my thesis proposal on a lovely $7$ dimensional Chern-Simons theory, so I went to Wanaka and bumped chairs and served chips to hungry skiers, and worried instead about the bottletops that my flatmate insisted on leaving all over the floor.

2012

Judgement Year.

Summer Time

Newton's birthday is fast approaching and so I must soon head into the mountains for a week. There is a fine spell of weather ahead. Still a lot of snow up high, even after a hot November, which should make the pass to the glacier easy going. Until 2012 then.

All Quiet On The Front

Pretty quiet around the physics blogosphere, isn't it? Ah, yes, everyone is locked up in the office again, furiously writing about the four color theorem as if it was their idea, even though they only heard about it for the first time yesterday. We should see another arxiv paper onslaught this week, probably triple the size of the superluminal neutrino theory burst.

So, A Condensate Higgs

So the observed Higgs mass simply agrees with the condensate formula

$2 m_{H} = m_{W} + m_{W} + m_{Z}$,

where a pair of Higgs form a Cooper pair. Anyway, a Standard Model Higgs was always essentially a condensate. But if we can elaborate further on the structure of this condensate, perhaps with our zoo of mirror particles, then in what sense does the Higgs exist? It exists because it reproduces the SM cross section correctly, as observed at the LHC. That's what matters. After all these decades, the Standard Model finally finds its home.

Higgs Update

The combination of results does look like very good evidence for a SM Higgs at $125$ GeV. I will be taking it seriously. However, on looking at the ATLAS and CMS data, the situation is far murkier than I would have thought possible with $5$ $\textrm{fb}^{-1}$ of data. The ATLAS presentation is especially beautiful. Here is a background-only hypothesis analysis, showing the $125$ GeV peak very clearly against the falling expectation curve.

In the $ZZ$ channel:

And CMS gives us a nice $ZZ$ channel summary: