The plenary sessions at ICHEP were what I was most looking forward to, but they didn’t really deliver. I expected to catch some results that I missed during the parallels in the summary talks, but there wasn’t too much “hot stuff” that I hadn’t already seen. What was very clear to me was that this ICHEP was a transitional conference, wedged between the flavor era of the factories (BaBar\/PEP-II, Belle\/KEK-B, CLEO-c\/CESR) and the energy frontier (Tevatron with full dataset, LHC). A lot of results were either very precision-oriented (measurements of Standard Model parameters, branching fractions, etc.) or prep-work for the energy frontier (GRID development for LHC data, Tevatron searches for Higgs and supersymmetry, LHC analysis tests and detector deployment). ICHEP08 will be quite something, coming just half a year after the LHC begins serious collisions.<\/p>\n
\nThere were some notables during the plenaries. I thought that the plenary that tried to connect QCD and string theory was bad – it assumed the audience knew all about both String Theory and QCD, and just talked about specific subtopics. It wasn’t until much later in the plenaries when a younger theorist really gave the audience the necessary introduction, which made the topic much more interesting.<\/p>\n
\nAlthough many of my colleagues seem to poo-poo it, RHIC and its detailed particle\/nuclear physics program is quite fascinating. I love thinking about the high-energy collision of two huge nuclei, deforming like liquid drops as they pass into one another and create an opaque, glass-like state of matter whose properties continue to induce wonder. I thought the two RHIC talks, one on experiment and the other on theory, were very good.<\/p>\n
\nOverall, the plenaries left me with a sense of incompleteness, a yearning for a time two or three years from now when the flavor era will come to a lull and the energy frontier will be breached.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The plenary sessions at ICHEP were what I was most looking forward to, but they didn’t really deliver. I expected to catch some results that I missed during the parallels in the summary talks, but there wasn’t too much “hot stuff” that I hadn’t already seen. What was very clear to me was that this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-601","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-physics","7":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}