From Perth
Carl and I are now happily settled at UWA, enjoying Perth's notoriously perfect weather. We are only a 5 minute walk from beaches on the Swan river. The FFP10 fun starts tomorrow. 
posted by Kea | 7:49 PM
7 Comments:
Welcome to Perth! How long are you two staying for?
Dec 1. And I don't know how she has the energy to blog.
Good luck with your presentations, Carl and Marni!
I hope also that you can blog a bit about the reception accorded to Prof. Gerard't Hooft's lecture, Gravity and the Quantum: the World may not be what it seems, the abstract for which states:
"... Quantum mechanics appears to allow for an interpretation in terms of a local, deterministic model, but only if the gravitational force is included."
I suspect that it will just be a obscure lecture, too abstruse and also too speculative to make any real impact or cause excitement?
Nigel,
The lecture was about gravity and cellular automatons. I kept looking back at the abstract but didn't see a lot of correlation.
Makes me feel better about my lecture, which has drifted somewhat from the advertised. I've added a section on zombie unification and kindergarten gravity theory.
'T hoofts work on cellular automata is quite remarkable, even if you dont like what he is trying to show. The idea of holography in quantum gravity can be traced back to a paper 't Hooft wrote about a model based on cellular automta.
His use of CA goes back a long way. He was influenced by Ed Fredkin when he was in the US so there are historical connections with the work of Wolfram too.
Also Nigel, your ears should be burning because your derivation of Koide's equation from classical center of mass and rotational energy is being discussed on physics forums. See towards the bottom of the page.
kea, I was thinking about you when I saw this abstract on Efimov trimers. Have you covered them here? Abstract below from THIS WEEK IN SCIENCE 12/18/09
"More Is Different, Few Is Exotic
As powerful as theoretical physics can be, when it comes to describing the dynamics of several interacting particles, it stumbles at three. This few-body physics is interesting in many contexts, particularly interactions within the nucleus and between atoms and molecules. Although predicted 40 years ago for the special case of resonant interaction, which occurs at the edge of where two-particle bound states start to form, Efimov trimers were only recently observed in ultracold Bose gases. More work followed, revealing evidence of multiple trimer, and even tetramer, states. Now, Pollack et al. (p. 1683, published online 19 November; see the Perspective by Modugno) observe as many as 11 features near a lithium resonance that can be directly related to different few-body processes. The positions of the features with respect to each other are in excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction, although some deviations, attributed to short-range interactions, present a challenge for a future, more detailed theory."
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