I love the Friden mechanical calculator on her desk. I used one of these at one of my first jobs. When a slide rule was not accurate enough, this would chug away and give you an answer to many digits. Taking square roots it chugged for a long time.
My first talk about the paper was at Colorado and an hour before the talk I find out that Weinberg was visiting that day. Fortunately I had appropriately mentioned him in the intro. He was complementary after the talk and revised his colloquium to discuss what I had said.
I gave a conference talk including GR at an EFT conference in Hungary a few years before my paper and the chiral folks’ reaction was sort of “so what - this is obvious - but you can’t measure anything”. Actually there is a history paper on the topic arxiv.org/pdf/2403.14008
Steve Weinberg made a comment of GR being an EFT in his 1979 paper on phenomenological Lagrangian. Most of the EFT work back then was on pion physics - chiral perturbation theory. That is where we learned how to do real calculations with it. No one was really talking about GR then.
For 48 years, physicists largely ignored a theory of gravity that was riddled with ghosts, nonsensical-seeming particles that have a negative probability of arising. Recent work by John Donoghue and Gabriel Menezes has helped reinvigorate the theory. www.quantamagazine.org/old-ghost-th...
This is a good article about a subtle topic in quantum gravity.
Thanks for the link. I did not know about that list.
Thanks Dan. It is definitely an honor to join the list of former recipients. (May I ask where you saw this - I have not seen it announced publicly yet.)
Seems problematic.
Did something happen recently?
Yes, I would expect it to be the Sommerfeld enhancement, but I was thinking that the top Higgs coupling was larger than its QCD coupling. And it should have a similar enhancement. Do we know how they compare in the actual amplitude?
Do you think that this if from Higgs exchange, which I think is stronger than QCD for the top quark at this energy?
Mine is shorter - I did not use a period. ( The arXiv refused to let me post with this abstract and made me say No in many words, so I am surprised that he got it past the ArXiv admin. The journal was happy to use it as written.)
www.actaphys.uj.edu.pl/fulltext?ser...
This is my talk at the Campagna conference www.pifp2025.it/home
This was quite an interesting and well organized conference.
Incredibly stupid. Such a major investment, and tremendous output - one of biggest success stories of our time. To cut this at its peak output is a crime.
That one was indeed great. Also, their paper on the renormalization group of the weak nonleptonic Hamiltonian was a foundational classic.
journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
I haven’t seen it mentioned here yet, but we have gotten word from CERN that both Mary K Gaillard and Jonathan Rosner have died. Their paper with Ben Lee was the entry to charm physics for so many of us, but each had separately a large impact on particle physics.
Yes this is incredibly damaging.
These work very well. I brought several home from a recent trip. Why not in the US?
It is a compilation of a lot of articles by many authors. All are on the arXiv. You can find many of them by using the search term Handbook of Quantum Gravity when searching via INSPIRE
Aren’t you likely to run into trouble with the Witten-Weinberg theorem when you try for a relativistic model of this type?
The shape near the minimum needs to be a quadratic. Probably the first deviation from that is also fixed by the need for the Higgs potential to be part of a renormalizable Lagrangian. Can measurements of the shape really tell us much?
Probably Ampere rather than Lorentz
Great news! Gauge Theory of Elementary Particle Physics by Ta-Pei Cheng and Ling-Fong Li (Oxford) is now OPEN ACCESS! 🎉 You can read and download it for free using the PDF link below. 📖✨
fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...
Our expectation of background is the equivalent of an undergraduate Quantum Mechanic course. Two examples are the commutation relation of [x,p] and an introduction to perturbation theory.
I don't mean to keep harping on my books, but I just noticed that my QFT book with Lorenzo Sorbo "A Prelude to Quantum Field Theory" is presently discounted to only $22.37 on the Princeton University Press website. Seems to be a good price.
press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/...
Maybe this is a good moment to reiterate that our book “Dynamics of the Standard Model”, which Gene contributed so much to (including Barry Holstein), is available for free (open access) at Cambridge University Press.
www.cambridge.org/core/books/d...
This was posted due to the news that Gene Golowich has passed away. A sad event an an end of an era for many of us.
Thanks for highlighting this. I had felt that it was mostly forgotten. Also thanks for doing these posts throughout December - I have enjoyed them and saved many for further study.
