School in Field Theory and Gravitation in Brazil

The school is going on since Monday in Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro. I just spent the day there to see people and to go to some talks.

I arrived when Roman Jackiw was already answering questions so I missed it all. Then João Magueijo talked about double special relativity, higher derivative theories and modified dispersion relations. I did not quite understand the setting, it seemed that all is some sort of effective theory. Then Rogério Rosenfeld gave a nice talk on little Higgs. It was a quite clear presentation but I still bet in supersymmetry. The next lecture was by Woolgar presenting some work on Ricci flows. It was interesting. Then Dimitry Galtsov talked about the old problem of back reaction. His former talk was in flat spacetime and he then moved to curved spacetime. Quite complicated! Then Rosenfeld presented another talk in the place of Angela Olinto because she didn´t show up. This time he talked about a model which mixes dark energy and dark matter. The last talk was given by Barton Zwiebach. It was the last lecture of a series of three. He explained how to get the vacuum solution of string field theory, Bernoulli numbers, 691 and the Riemann hypothesis! Uau!!

The school program is quite heavy for the students. Eight one hour lectures is too much. Many of them were already tired. The conference place is quite good and the organizers did a nice work.