More conference reporting

I just found that the weekly quality paper "Die Zeit" has an interview with Smolin on the occation of Loops '05. Probably no need to learn German for this, nothing new: String theory doesn't predict anything because there are 10^500 String theories (they lost the ^ somewhere), Peter W. can tell you more about this, stringy people have lost contact to experiment, LQG people do better because they predict a violation of the relativistic dispersion relation for light (is this due to the 3+1 split of their canonical formalism?) and Einstein would have been suppressed today because he was an independant thinker and not part of the (quantum mechanics) mainstream.

I was told, "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" also had a report on Loops '05. On their webpage, the article costs 1.50 Euros and I am reluctant to pay this. Maybe one of my readers has a copy and can post/fax it to me?

Tomorrow, I will be going to Hamburg where for three days they are celebrating the opening of the centre for mathematical physics. This is a joint efford of people from the physics (Louis, Fredenhagen sen., Samtleben, Kuckert) and math (Schweigert) departments of Hamburg university and the DESY theory group (Schomerus, Teschner). This is only one hour away and I am really looking forward to having a stringy critical mass coming together in northern Germany. Speakers of the opening colloquium include Dijkgraaf (hopefully he will make it this time), Hitchin, Zamolodchikov, Nekrassov, Cardy and others.

If there is some reasonable network connection, there will be some more live blogging, Urs in now a postdoc in Christoph Schweigert's group, I assume he will be online as well.