Nima Arkani-Hamed attracts India to physics

Nima Arkani-Hamed, a winner of the inaugural Milner prize who just sent me a kind and interesting e-mail, is visiting India.



He gave an interview to the Times of India:

Idea of space and time needs to be replaced: Arkani-Hamed

In the interview, he talks about the Higgs discovery, the future of particle physics, evolution of quantum mechanics, unity of string theory and particle physics, validity of the Big Bang theory, and benefits of the Milner prize for physics. You may tell everyone what you think about the questions and Nima's answers (yes, I agree with every word of his here, so my comments wouldn't be too interesting).




So the questions are pretty interesting for you to look at the interview. Try to guess which of the questions contains the topics referred to by the title. Yes, it's the QM question. ;-)

It's October 1st so aside from bureaucracy with monthly and quarterly payments (including the value-added tax), one more thing happened to this blog. The Haloscan/JS-Kit/Echo comments have finally come out of business, kind of gradually: look what a typical high-traffic Echo comment page looks like now.

All of the 70,000+ comments should have been transferred to the new DISQUS 2012 platform, with some relatively minor defects (especially the by-DISQUS ignored "parent comments" nested structure of the replies) that most readers won't even notice and the more careful ones will surely forgive them as signs of the fact that we don't live in an ideal world and we don't read a blog with infinite resources. ;-)

Due to the inconsistent and time-dependent conventions used in the XML file with the Echo comments, the conversion process has been rather difficult – thanks to Wolfram Mathematica for the help – and with all my characteristic modesty, I must tell you that I don't know another blogger on this planet who has successfully migrated from Haloscan+JS-Kit+Echo full evolution tree to DISQUS.

P.S. on health: It's probably the first day today when one could meaningfully argue that I actually feel healthier and more full of energy than when I downgraded my body as "out of proper balance" sometime in mid August. Yesterday, I played floorball again and biking and other sports don't reveal any disorders. For a week, my brown by-products have passed the strictest visual tests. Starting from yesterday or so, symptoms including the bad sweetish and sugar-transforming taste have been reduced to nearly invisible, homeopathic traces of what they were two or three weeks ago. The diet without sugar, gluten, yeast, vinegar, coffee, alcohol, caffeine etc. is brutal – over 90% of things in the supermarket are suddenly "not eligible" – but my discipline is superior and I don't mind looking at these things that I can't have. Of course, all the things that are forbidden may be pretty much compensated and "redone" from other things; they're convertible. Some things I wouldn't be buying in the past – like vegetables (at most, I would be buying fruits) or, if I mention a random product, a cheese with horseradish – are actually fun. And of course, white yoghurts became a really frequent consumable, due to their content of the friendly bacteria cultures, my new small individualist friends (who arguably share the foes, the collectivist yeasts from the kingdom of Fungi, with me: but I downgraded the latter from would-be plants to obnoxious large molecules). Among the hopefully "intensely anti-yeast things", I bought Candix at Candix.cz (mainly Capryllic acid, together with the probiotic cultures and vitamin C), 300 ml of coconut oil, and some goat milk (and yoghurts based on it) which is about 5 times more expensive than the cow milk counterpart(s) but is rich in the capryllic and similar acids that suppress the kingdom of Fungi within our animal body. Your hypothetical contributions (to the piglet at the bottom left of this blog) below $20 will be almost certainly used to buy similar "luxurious" counterparts of usual groceries.