07 April 2006

Eurostrings 2006 (II)

There were several interesting talks today. Schwarz talked about string theory books, in fact about just two books. He told some stories about the GSW book (it took only 9 months to write both volumes!) and announced his new book written together with two other collaborators. The new book is on strings and M-theory and looks like an update on the GSW book. He presented the table of contents and it looks quite good with very recent material included in it. It has more than 700 pages and will be available late this year.

The talk on susy quantum mechanics by Veneziano was funny. He found that the number of states in his model is related to the combinatorics of necklaces! And how he found out this relationship? Using Google...

Gibbons tried to resurrect the old steady state cosmology as a source for inflation. And also included a Born-Infeld type formulation of gravity.

Seiberg talked about a new mechanism for dynamical susy breaking which was published earlier this year. Nothing new was added.

Other talks were more technical. Like Strominger trying to show why there is a square in ZBH = |Z|2TOP.

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