I’m at Amplitudes this week, my subfield’s big yearly conference, located this year in sweltering but otherwise lovely Zurich.
A typical inhabitant of Zurich.
I gave a talk on Tuesday. They’ve posted the slides online, and I think they’re going to post the talk itself at some point.
This is the first year I’ve been to Amplitudes, and it’s remarkable seeing the breadth of the field. We’ve got everything from people focused heavily on the needs of experimentalists, trying to perfect calculations that will reduce the error on measurements coming out of the LHC, to people primarily interested in some of the more esoteric aspects of string theory. Putting everyone into the same room definitely helps emphasize just how many different approaches there are under the amplitudes umbrella. It’s the first time I’ve really appreciated just how “big” the field is, how much it’s grown to encompass.
4 gravitons 
I’ve been reading about it here: https://edwardfhughes.wordpress.com/
Seems there’s a lot of progress on many separate fronts. Do you know of any somewhat recent “big picture” article on what’s been happening with amplitudes or, better yet, could you write one? 🙂
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Hmm. I feel like pretty much all of the amplitudes articles I’ve seen have just covered one corner or another. Indeed, it might be worth writing a big “state of the field” post. I’ll have to look around to make sure I’m really covering everyone though.
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No need to be complete. When you want to find out if a watermelon is tasty, you don’t market it by taking a grain of salt sized sample from each part of the watermelon, you take one hefty chunk from one part of it that illustrates the quality and character of the whole.
The same applies to any particular subdiscipline of physics. One of Feynmann’s points of genius in communicating physics to the educated lay public is that he took one or two small and simple, but real problems and then ran his audience through all the steps a real physicist would (heuristic descriptions of meaning of some of the more difficult math in lieu of the minutae of calculations aside), and then demonstrated what was involved, showing rather than telling what it was all about.
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“Big picture” post now up.
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Enjoy some Swiss white chocolate!
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