Strings 2010

I have been reading in the internet about the strings 2010, which this year has place in Texas, for a while. But I had not paid too much attention because I thought that, as usually, the event would be in summer.

Today I have been shocked when I saw a quick note in U duality blog saying that the conferences have been going this week.

This wee I was not particularly busy and if I just would have read carefully the dates I could have seen the livecast (available here).

Well, I still can see the slides of the talks of the past three days and the remaining ones (if the livecast works properly).

Well, at least I can see that still are very important people pending so it still there is some fun.

The most amazing of this is the total absence of mentions to the conferences in the everybody's favorite string theory superhero. Seemingly some global warming supervillian has taken him out from his usual missions ;).

Other than this in the meantime from the last post there has been an announcement about possible dark matter detection (you can read it in resonances, shores of the Dirac sea and , the older entry, in Lubos blog. I am planing to write my own entry, in Spanish, in my other blog).

Also Smoot et all published their second paper applying, as announced, their idea of an entropic force due to CEH(cosmic event horizons)to inflation. I'll post about it sometime in the near future. In particular I'll see if I can say something on how that idea could work together with dynamical horizons formalism for black holes and if it could somewhat influence the picture of black hole evaporation.

Of course there have been other interesting papers. For example a few authors took the F-theory GUT's strategy (that is, phenomenology using local models) to construct an MSSM from F-theory. Certainly it doesn't look that great compared with GUT, but if the dark matter detection is true, and the detected particle is something similar to a neutralino that MSSM F-theoretic scenery could be most easily compatible with that discovery than the GUT. As far as I have been able to think about it one possibility- taken account that in a certain sense F-theory GUTS are a universal extra dimension for the gauge bosons, that is, they live in a 7-brane- would be to seek Kaluza-Klein dark matter. The problem is that the involved gauge bosons are the unification ones and not the electroweaks,as it would be required for viable light dark matter. Well, maybe there are workarounds.

Also I wonder how the Smoot proposal, if admitted truth,could relax the conditions of the Vafa GUT (some of them are related to cosmology) to allow a better fit with a possible neutralino. In fact I would like to be able to analyze that kind of questions myself, but I still need to learn more in detail these questions.A good thing is that since I have the tablet PC I am advancing a lot faster. The point is that these, and for sure others, questions are worth of investigation (they are very close to measurable phenomena). As fr as I see they are much more realistic lines of research that the Verlinde proposal, which still has a good echo in arxiv. Possibly the ultimate reason behind it is not the quality and viability of the ideas but simple the difficulty of them. Easier research have more followers, simply because they offer more published papers, and them academic positions.

That is not exclusive of physic. A friend of me told me that the same thing happens in maths. Well, I understand that this thing happen. But maybe it would be good for science if the academy wouldn't be the only way to go. Or at least if it wouldn't be so burocrathic and there would be intermediate ways in which people could do some paid work in high end physics, at least sometimes, proved that the work is reasonably good. Well, I know it is not going to happen so it doesn't worth to loose time with the idea.

P.S. I'll edit the entry to ad the lacking links when I have a while for it.