Pleasant surprise

Probably I am not the only one having as a habit to visit blogs as the first activity after wake-up. May be it is due to age but I have become lazy and tend to visit again and again in the same blogs and get usually irritated since the comment sections are usually rather dull. At this time this visit was stimulating rather than irritating. In Not-Even Wrong there were three postings deserving brief comments.

Old men in Solvay centennary

The first posting by Peter Woit was about Solvay centennary conference. I learned that the average age of participants was 61 years. For 100 years ago it was 41 years. Quite a change! But not everything has changed: practically all participants were still males! You might blame me for age-racism but I dare claim that the increase of the average age certainly does not signal about the vitality of the field of theoretical physics!

Braney explanation of neurino super-luminality

Second posting was the newest This Week's Hype telling about Michael Duff's explanation of neutrino super-luminality. Someone in the comment section told that Michael Duff has done this publicly in BBC2: see below. String theorists of course have the first night privilege to good ideas in the feudal community of theoretical physics and as a humble peasant of the community I can only take a philosophical attitude!;-)

Here in England, tonight BBC2 TV just screened a “Faster than Light” program with Michael Duff giving some string theory hype to explain the alleged 60 ns “faster than light” neutrinos. Duff stated that the results could be explained by neutrinos leaving our 4-d brane, taking a super-fast short-cut through the 11-d bulk, and then appearing again on the 4-d brane nearer the detector.

Replace "brane/short-cut" with "spaced-time sheet" along with particles propagate, add the notions of induced metric and light-like geodesic in induced metric distinguishing it light-like geodesics of the imbedding space and here it is.

Or at least almost! Something is still lacking: why the maximal signal velocity at neutrino space-time sheets would be higher than at photon space-time sheets? Why it depends on length scale, why not on energy? And so on...? Here one cannot avoid TGD and induced gauge field concept and TGD unavoidably creeps in. See the details at my blog.

AdS/CFT does not work well in heavy ion collisions at LHC

The third posting was titled String Theory Finds a Bench Mate. The posting mentioned the posting of Sabine Hossenfelder in BackReaction blog mentioning:

As the saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words, but since links and image sources have a tendency to deteriorate over time, let me spell it out for you: The AdS/CFT scaling does not agree with the data at all.

I went the BackReaction blog and found an excellent posting and surprise-surprise: a comment section full of interesting comments from people who know what they are talking about! This saved my morning. The posting was so good that it deserves a separate posting!