Newlyweds physics blog sorts out quark puff hullaballoo

[Martin]

there is one outstanding physics blog and it is run by Bee and Stefan who just got married

 

anyone who gets anything out of physics blogs probably already knows this one. it is called "Backreaction". if you don't know it, then now is a good occasion to get acquainted. Bee's specialty is in string-and-non-string phenomenology, but the blog is about all kinds of other things as well

 

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/10/does-string-theory-explain-heavy-ion.html

 

thing about Bee is she HAS to be unbiased for professional reasons. her specialty is TESTING theories which involves judging them fairly and evaluating their claims and predictions===it is called "phenomenology", that is where you figure out the tests, and then you let the experimentalists do the actual work. phenomenology is like the "theoretical part of experimentation" that guides experiment into fruitful lines of investigation

 

so she has to be able to cut thru the hype, and have a sense of humor, and stay reasonably friends with both sides of any arguments that develop

 

she just moved from Santa Barbara to Waterloo Ontario (Perimeter Institute) and her furniture got lost so this blog is about living with one piece of furniture, a couch she bought in canada

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/10/on-couch.html

and a california beach story

 

after the blog had been in existence for a year or so (IIRC) the two owners of the blog, Stefan and Bee, got married and there is another recent blog with their wedding pictures from germany (they are German, it makes their English prose style sometimes fresh and unexpected). you can find more fun stuff if you want

 

this is another good recent Bee blog

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/10/inverse-problem.html

 

BUT THE MAIN THING I WANT TO MENTION IS THIS ONE

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/10/does-string-theory-explain-heavy-ion.html

because it written by BOTH bee and stefan, with stefan interjecting comments in parens in bees paragraph and then bee replying

which given that they .....well it is an unusual expository style and one gets a few chuckles//////also it is keen and insightful IMO

 

the topic is those HOT QUARK-GLUON GAS EXPLOSIONS that result from "relativistic heavy ion collision" that is from the collision of two gold nuclei or gold ions head-on at near speed of light, which was described (possibly hyped) as making like a little big bang because it was so hot.

 

and the quarks all came loose, which doesnt usually happen

 

bee and stefan don't waste any time popularizing about the quark-puffs resulting from these collisions----that is for journalists. what they are discussing is a serious side issue of whether some stringy math called AdS/CFT had anything to say about the quark-puffs. (and whether string theorists, who normally don't predict much, had any business piping up about the quark puffs). you can see the bloggers are pretty even-handed about this.

[GutZ]

Whomever is writting has a very elegant writting style, I'll read more, comment later.