What a Sadness

I just learned the news from Motl’s blog, that Julius Wess died on Aug 8th, just several days after SUSY 07. He even gave a colloquium on that conference, and we were joking that Bagger just went there to see this old freind. Because of his contribution to Supersymmetry, Wess would be sure to ge the Nobel Prize if LHC found SUSY particles. Now he died too suddenly, and too early, to witness his beautiful theory to be tested.

Well, maybe now he can go to ask the God directly, and find the answer even earlier than us. But will the God give him any rewards if he was right?

大牛现身

今天一打开arXiv，就发现 ‘t Hooft 同学挂了两篇帖子。我还以为是他新发paper了，原来都是报告发言稿。其中一篇The Grand View of Physics，短短6页，从Salam的高度和胆量谈开去，为的是再次阐明自己对以量子力学为基础的从量子场论到超弦的一系列理论的怀疑。他说建立在Hilbert空间线性变换上的量子力学很可能是不完备的，我们仍然需要努力寻找量子力学“背后”（尽管很多人认为量子力学没有“背后”）的解释以发现可能的全新物理。不知道他是否真的接爱因斯坦的班，是个彻底的决定论者。不过退回到量子力学重新寻找全新的道路是个极其艰巨的任务，恐怕也只有’t Hooft 这种功成名就的老前辈才敢玩。无论如何，’t Hooft这种牛人存在的价值就是让人大开眼界。还有一篇比较长，Emergent Quantum Mechanics and Emergent Symmetries. 只看了abstract, 把量子统计涌现性（根源是决定论的）跟规范对称性和广义坐标变换等价性联系起来，很难说有多大理论价值，但貌似很有意思，什么时候有空再看看。