It’s been a while since I last polled you guys. Back then, I was curious what sorts of backgrounds my readers had. In the end, roughly half of you had some serious background in high-energy physics, while the other half had seen some physics, but not a lot.
This time, I’d like to know what sort of content you want to see. WordPress tells me how well an individual post does, but there isn’t much of a pattern to my best-performing posts beyond the vagaries of whose attention they grab. That’s why I’m asking you what you want to see more of. I’ve split things into vague categories. Feel free to vote for as many as you like, and let me know in the comments if there’s something I missed.
4 gravitons 
I enjoy your blog because of the variety of topics. I enjoyed working in libraries because I wound up reading books that I wouldn’t have initially sought. Keep up the good work!
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Blogs are how I keep up with the latest in fundamental physics. Since Matt Strassler and Jester left us, I’m looking for somebody else who will keep us up to date. There are a couple of others out there, but I don’t like them for various reasons (things like too much politics/hobbies/sensationalism/personal/etc.) so it would sure be awesome if you’d pick up the mantle.
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Has Jester actually stopped blogging? I haven’t seen him post in a while, but it seemed like he was just posting more sparsely, not that he had stopped altogether.
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Six and a half months since his last post is a bit more than (or is it less than?) sparsely.
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Some webcomics have had sparser update schedules, but fair enough. 😛
Mostly I was just curious if he had made some sort of statement about quitting blogging or the like.
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That is a very sad thing, especially when they leave you on a cliffhanger.
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How about a post on your favorite textbooks on different areas in physics, for introductory, advanced undergrad, and graduate levels? Also, favorite non-textbooks for different topics in physics and/or history of physics. In addition, how about more posts explaining different ideas in HEP/QFT, both long established, and cutting edge?
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Hi,
Hope is not too much to ask,
I do have a specific question about a particular topic. I would like to do research in this area, but I’m not sure if this has been proven to be not interesting (i.e. true but trivial) or wrong. Maybe was left aside because it was found too difficult, or because no one came with anything to say about it since then. This ideas were around at the end of the ‘80 beginning of the ‘90s from people like Friedan, Dubrovin and Krichever.
Is there research worth doing in the relation between KP hierarchies and higher genus amplitudes?
Would it offer a non-perturbative solution?
Would it help with the problem of moduli in strings amplitudes?
It is related to the Grassmannian also. I though that maybe because you are/ were in touch with so many high quality researchers you might have either heard something or are able to find out about it.
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I’m not familiar with KP hierarchies in general. It doesn’t look like there’s been much crosstalk between the integrability folks who work on KP hierarchies and the string amplitudes community (glancing through an arXiv search on KP hierarchy, I don’t recognize any of the author names). So I honestly have no idea whether there’s something valuable there or not. I’ll keep an ear out and see if anyone’s working on something similar.
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Nowadays I’m interested about random tensors, melon Feynman graphs, etc.
Are you familiar with this stuff to post something?
Distler I assume will not post for a while after the not so enthusiastic response of his readership to his last post 🙂
Your feed stopped working BTW…
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Someone’s hopped on the SYK bandwagon I see? 😛
(I’ve seen a few talks on it, so…maybe? I’m not really as excited about it as other people seem to be.)
I’ll see what’s up with the feed. Most likely wordpress “updated” something…
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Well yes 🙂 but not because I’m just following the fad; it has some interesting connections to a subject I’ve been following for quite some time.
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Indeed the feed source was updated, I replaced it with the new one and it is working now.
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Hi 4Gravitons,
Long term reader, first time poster. First of all, may I plead with you not to engage in arguments with other bloggers. Second of all, I’d encourage you to write what excites you, whether that’s amplitudes, silly things or space. As for what I’d like to see, I’m a non-practicing physics PhD who worked in particle cosmology, but that was a long time ago. So I have more knowledge than the layperson, but much less than someone working in the field today, which is why I voted for tricky concepts in QFT, gravity, (maybe you could also do a post about the Oxford comma?) or string theory.
Best regards,
Steve
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I like how the result is a zipf law.
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Flip Tanedo, (Quantum Diaries) and Matt Strassler stopped blogging, and the LHC did what it was built for (and will add significant digits to all SM parameters, but probably nothing outside of the SM will come out). So I’m curious for getting some new neutrino physics, for news about Verlinde’s “emergent gravity”, for original interpretations of quantum weirdness and the outcome of the muon g-factor thingy. Oh, and [blushing] I just love Young Tableaux.
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I have enjoyed all your posts but would be particularly interested in a post that covered d-branes, and especially the D3 spherical brane. According to one reference (*) I came across, the D3 brane would support properties of N=4 SYM. If such a brane could exist I’m wondering how it would interact with other similar D3 spheres (bounce, boom or bust?).
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/D3-brane
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