I realised that I forgot to tell you how things went with the Southern California Strings Seminar’s second meeting, hosted this time at UCLA by my colleagues Michael Gutperle and Per Kraus, which I’d posted about here. It happened on the 23rd and 24th September. They did a great job of getting everything to run smoothly, we had the great surroundings of their nice new physics building, and so it went very well indeed. We had six excellent talks. Really excellent. The speakers were all very cooperative with one of the main things we asked: They devoted significant amount of time to carefully explain and motivate what their talk was about before launching into great details and new results. These were some of the best combination overview/technical talks I’ve seen of these topics. The schedule had plenty of time for expaning on ideas, questions, and discussion. It was all clear, informative, inspiring and fun.

Have a look here at the schedule of talks. Unforunately, it was decided that there was too much logistical pressure to try recording and streaming all the seminars this time around -especially with so much video available elsewhere- but I will try to get the speakers to give me copies of their slides where possible, and put them on the scss page (when I eventually update it) along with links to video of the talks given elsewhere, if possible. (See the ITP’s online talks website, from the program where several of them spoke, for example.)

In the meantime, have a look at the various pointing poses of the speakers, just for fun:

In order of speaking, we have Zvi Bern (The S-Matrix Reloaded: Twistors, Unitarity, N=4 super-Yang-Mills and Supergravity) and Jonathan Feng (Cosmology at Colliders):

Clifford Johnson (D-Branes and Fluxes in the Type 0A Minimal String) and Petr Horava (Noncritical M-theory in Three Dimensions):

Matthias Staudacher (Integrability in AdS/CFT) and Jan Louis (Compactification on Generalized Geometries):

…and Jerome Gauntlett (AdS Solutions and Some Deformations ):

-cvj