a quantum of solace?

I cannot deny that the quality of this blog is declining rapidly (actually it is more accurate to say it did not improve as quickly as I hoped for). Thus I changed the title to reflect this sad fact.

In this spirit I shall write a few lines now about quantum gravity and the links I collected recently.



In her last post Sabine asks if quantum gravity has been observed by GLAST/Fermi in the gamma ray burst GRB 080916C. Interestingly, Lubos wrote about the same result(s) but with exactly the opposite conclusion. (Did I mention that the two don't like each other?)

Previously, Peter wrote once again about string theory being useless for ever predicting anything. At about the same time Lubos mentioned a recent paper about 'The footprint of F-theory at the LHC' and concluded that
the validity of string theory is a settled fact and indeed string theory is highly predictive. (Did I mention that the two don't like each other?)

Lubos also discussed Boltzmann eggs, mostly to attack a straw man used to stand in for Sean Carroll and his upcoming book. (Did I mention that the two don't like each other?)

CIP picked up on it and in comments to his post Lubos made some confusing or confused statements, which you may or may not find interesting.



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And even more links.

John Ellis et al. also discussed the GLAST/Fermi and related results.

Craig Hogan proposes that excess noise observed at the GEO600 interferometric gravitational-wave detector could be direct evidence of holographic quantum gravity.

But Igor Smolyaninov thinks that this is unlikely.

Renata Kallosh found an argument why d=4 N=8 supergravity is finite for all loops.

Simon Catterall et al. put N=4 SYM on a 4d lattice (see also here).

Last, but not least, Aaron Bergman asks an important question about fretless guitars.