Sunday, April 18, 2010

SERC School: The Second Half

The second half of the SERC seems more fun to me. There are three reasons for this I guess:
1. I am fully used to the situations(living and food) here which looked quite weired when I first came here.
2. 22nd April, the day on which I am leaving this place is not too far :)
3. Shiraz is taking AdS-CFT course and Loganayan is taking the tutorials.

The first two factors are psychological of course. But the third factor is a genuine one. As I have mentioned in many of my previous posts, it's always fun to attend Shiraz's lectures no matter how much I understand. But this time its both fun as well as academically interesting. May be because I had little exposure to string theory from previous SERC school and some of Shiraz's lecture videos, I am finding the present lectures not too hard. And best thing is that Shiraz and Loga both are very enthusiastic for both in and outside classroom discussions. Since the crowd in the school is from various backgrounds in the sense that all did not have any exposure to string theory before, Shiraz has to digress a lot in between the lectures. Most of the questions people ask in the class are very broad questions rather than technical. I don't understand why people don't ask such questions outside the classroom, e.g. in the tutorials or dinner table. Nobody can learn string theory in just nine lectures on AdS-CFT and Hydrodynamics. Better we should stick to the technical aspects of the topic rather than asking questions like "Why string theory is the best theory of quantum gravity?, Why LQG does not work as good as string ?...." bla bla. From tomorrow onwards he will start with the fluid dynamics aspects after the brief review of Large N gauge theories and AdS-CFT correspondence in last five lectures.

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