Higgs events in Erice 1990

In an earlier post I mentioned meeting Peter Higgs at Erice in 1990. An alert reader sent me the picture below, which was taken at the School of Subnuclear Physics in Erice that year. (Click for larger image.)Seated in the first row are (I think) Dokshitzer, Ferrara, Weisskopf, Zichichi, Higgs (blue socks and sandals), a woman I don't recognize, Glashow, ?? , Ringwald. I am in a maroon shirt sort of behind Glashow.Digging around in my photo album,...

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Information loss and energy nonconservation

Bill Unruh's KITP seminar on information loss and energy non-conservation stimulates a vigorous discussion of one of the key aspects of the black hole information problem. The question is whether pure states can evolve into mixed states (decohere) without energy loss. The answer is of course yes, but many (perhaps most) black hole researchers are under the impression that a famous paper by Banks, Peskin and Susskind showed that information loss...

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L'oeuvre des enfants

The iphone is our main method of preserving the flood of creative works generated by the kids :-) The boy is starting to learn algebra at age 6. I wish I had had someone around to teach it to me. My dad the professor spent very little time on that sort of thing. I grew up like the Draper kids in Mad M...

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UC Irvine colloquum

I should have put this up earlier in case anyone in the LA area wanted to attend. But I was too busy at KITP and forgot. UCI Physics Colloquium (slides). Genetics of Intelligence and Other Quantitative Traits Date: Thu, 04/26/2012 Time: 3:30 pm Location: RH 101 How do genes affect cognitive ability or other quantitative traits such as height? I begin with a brief review of psychometric measurements of intelligence, introducing the idea of a "general factor" or IQ score. The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power), and...

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Afghanistan is lost

Listen to this interview. [In contrast to the Russians ...] "We thought because we had good intentions, and if we treated people nicely, we could succeed. After 10-11 years and so many civilian casualties, most accidental -- there's only so many times you can say 'sorry we killed your family, but we're here to help you'. We've passed that point a long time ago ..." Journalist and documentary-maker Ben Anderson discusses the war in Afghanistan, and his experience reporting on front lines in Helmand province. His book No Worse Enemy: The Inside...

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"Compounding returns of intelligence"

This is from Stanford's CS183 course on startups. The lecturers include Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Stephen Cohen of Palantir. Stephen Cohen: We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that...

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How the Higgs boson became the Higgs boson

IIRC, I met Peter Higgs in Erice in 1990. He was quite a nice fellow, but the story below by Steve Weinberg illustrates how capricious is the allocation of credit in science. NYBooks: (Footnote 1) In his recent book, The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I cited 1964 work by Peter Higgs and two other sets of theorists. This was because they had all explored the mathematics of...

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California dreamin'

Joel Kotkin, writing in the WSJ, says California is headed in the same direction as Greece. WSJ: ... Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation's premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas' iconic "California Dreamin'" and the Beach Boys' "California Girls." But it also attracted young, ambitious...

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Science and Engineering PhDs per hundred graduates

Interesting NSF data showing which undergraduate institutions' students are most likely to go on to earn science and engineering PhDs. (Click for larger graphic.)Which institution produces the largest number US PhDs in absolute terms? See here. Science 11 July 2008: A new study has found that the most likely undergraduate alma mater for those who earned a Ph.D. in 2006 from a U.S. university was … Tsinghua University. Peking University, its neighbor...

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Brain volume genes

I received many emails about this Nature paper: Common variants at 12q14 and 12q24 are associated with hippocampal volume, which purports to find an IQ gene. I had seen the paper before it went public.The gene they found satisfies the genome wide significance threshold for correlation to brain volume, but not for IQ. If you adopt a Bayesian point of view that the gene is already interesting because of the volume association, and *then* test it for IQ association, you get a significant result (p < 0.05, or whatever). But it still needs to be...

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Monsters in AdS

Slides I used for the workshop discussion yesterday: What Part of the Asymptotically AdS Gravitational Phase Space is Dual to a CFT?In classical general relativity one can construct configurations with fixed ADM mass but arbitrarily large entropy. These objects collapse into black holes but have more entropy than the area of the resulting black hole. Their interpretation in quantum gravity and in the AdS/CFT duality is an open question.This topic is also nicely discussed by Don Marolf here and here.It was great to have Bill Unruh in the audience,...

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Sony is toast

See my post Sell Sony, buy Samsung from 2005 for comparison. Where is Ken Kutagari these days? Younger people today probably can't remember a time when Sony was a technology leader.In 2005 it was clear to me that Sony was in trouble and Samsung on the rise. I also knew OS X and the iPod were going to be very successful, but I had been conditioned by MSFT's success to think that mediocrity would continue to rule in PCs and other computer products. So I certainly didn't think Apple's market cap would reach its current value. NYTimes: Sony ... is...

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Rethinking Finance

Mark Thoma points me to an interesting conference: Rethinking Finance.Burton Malkiel's paper defines EMH to mean (roughly) "it's hard to beat the market, but of course prices could be way off at any particular time" (yes, Virginia, there are bubbles). This is what I refer to as a weak version of EMH.Arnold Kling highlights the following talks (click through for links):Foote, Girardi, and Willen ask whether, given expectations for ever-rising house prices, the institutional and regulatory details make any difference. If people expect house prices...

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The Instagram story

I was shocked at the $1B Instagram acquisition, but then again I'm not exactly up to speed on the latest in iPhone apps or social networking. This Times article gives some background. Although the article stresses founder Kevin Systrom's Stanford connections, it seems like the go to guy was really a Caltecher ;-)NYTimes: Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram. What happened...

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Bits, Branes, Black Holes

Greetings from Santa Barbara! I'm here at KITP for three weeks of Bits, Branes, Black Holes.Theoretical physics action video and slides. (Opening session of the workshop: an overview of the black hole information problem. Highly recommended if you have the right backgroun...

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Higgs bosons, information and black holes

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been a bit busy with this Higgs data meeting. It's fun to have people from both CMS and ATLAS (the two detector collaborations at LHC) together in an informal setting :-)Next week (and for two more weeks after that) I will be at KITP Santa Barbara at the Bits, Branes, Black Holes worksh...

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