Still working on an Life at the American Astronomical Society meeting, in Seattle, is interesting.
In addition to the science and jobs and collaboration meetings, there is socialization and politicking.
At some level, a fraction of the guiding input into multibillion dollar multiyear national policies happen here. In particular to get support for mission concepts and science priorities, there is a lot of schmoozing and minor feelgooding - for example Northrop Grumman are building the JWST the multibillion dollar "successor" to the Hubble.
It is over budget and late, of course, and the fallout from that is getting painful enough that there are mutterings that we ought to cut our losses and cancel.
Not gonna happen, but Northrop did an awful lot of hosting and had a lot of staffers floating around being friendly.
On a completely unrelated note, Ed Witten was spotted wandering the halls...
Now there is always some cosmic string or quantum cosmo thingy going on here, but what we ask (and, yes, I did actually ask), was he doing in the extrasolar planet session?
Ed likes exoplanets!
Dood.
Comments
It's because string theory has the remarkable property that it predicts gravity. On other planets where they first discover string theory as a description of particle physics before observing the gravitational force, string theory will inevitably lead them to the prediction of gravity.
These are essentially his quotes (EW), and I subscribe to them. ;-)
Because the "critics of science" often attack the otherwise obviously correct statement that string theory predicts gravity, it could be a good idea to look for some exoplanets where they actually went through this kind of history. Once we find such a planet, it could silence the critics. :-)
Given their limited ability to understand other, more structured rational arguments, the scenario from the previous paragraph could actually be the simplest solution how to convince them. ;-)
Posted by: Lubos Motl | January 11, 2007 7:44 PM
I think at least one of those words needs to be "postdicts".
More realistically - with Scott Tremaine moving down to IAS and with Peter Goldreich already there, the intellectual climate at SNS might tilt a bit more towards planet formation and dynamics then it has in the last couple of decades, which might lead to a stimulus for intellectual interest and information gathering, if only to be able to accurately evaluate incoming postdocs and senior fellows. Or to do actual science, there is room for researchers in the field, whether they like ab initio theory or more higher level phenomenology.
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | January 11, 2007 10:32 PM