The Second Phase of the Asian Winter school

The second phase of the Winter school here at Mahableshwar started yesterday, which was a really hectic day (with the schedule from 9 am to 9 45 pm) after the tiring trip and banquet party on Sunday. A couple of new lectures have started: AdS-CFT and hydrodynamics by Shiraz, Finite temperature aspects of AdS-CFT by L. Yaffe, HEP Phenomenology by John Ellis (CERN). Shiraz has started with elementary fluid dynamics and after giving two lectures on it, he has moved to the gravity aspects of it. The best part in his lectures is that he never skip anything, he tries to explain each and every point thoroughly no matter how long it takes. Although I never attended his lectures before, I became a great fan of him after I watched his string theory lecture videos (upto part 7) in our Physics department as I mentioned before in my blog. I am not being able to follow Yaffe's lectures however, many of the technical terms he is using are unfamiliar to me. The lectures by John are however too elementary for me since I have been working on particle physics phenomenology for last one year. But still I can't sleep during his lectures, in fact nobody can. He keeps the whole audience alive through his amazing sense of humor and the funny animations in his slides. The school is going to end day after tomorrow; it was really fun both from academic as well as non-academic point of view :P