Skip to the Main Content

Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

August 24, 2013

Zombies

Normally, I wouldn’t touch a paper, with the phrase “Boltzmann brains” in the title, with a 10-foot pole. And anyone accosting me, intent on discussing the subject, would normally be treated as one of the walking undead.

But Sean Carroll wrote a paper and a blog post and I really feel the need to do something about it.

Posted by distler at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Followups (29)

August 6, 2013

Maybe this time …

Lucy snatches football from Charlie Brown... again

For many years, I tried keeping up with the LQG literature. Though it provided occasional fodder for blogging, it mostly was an exercise in frustration. Years ago, I gave up the effort. Still, occasionally, an LQG paper crosses my radar screen with claims interesting enough to cause me to suspend my better judgement.

One such paper, by Gomes et al, purports to be a significant breakthrough in the understanding of AdS/CFT. They claim to reproduce the conformal anomaly of a boundary CFT from some Loopy formulation (“Shape Dynamics”) of the bulk theory, thereby shedding light on the 1998 computation of Henningson and Skenderis who first reproduced the conformal anomaly from AdS/CFT (a more careful and thorough derivation can be found in a followup paper).

How could I resist?

Posted by distler at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Followups (6)