Category Archives: Uncategorized

This past semester I taught our graduate class on Lie groups and representations, and spent part of the course on the Heisenberg group and the oscillator representation. Since the end of the semester I’ve been trying to clean up and … Continue reading →

A few unrelated items: I’ve been hearing from several people about their plans to travel to China this summer, just realized that they’re all going there for the same reason, to participate in the First International Congress of Basic Science. … Continue reading →

I want to make up for linking to something featuring Michio Kaku yesterday by today linking to the exact opposite, an insightful explanation of the history of string theory, discussing the implications of how it was sold to the public. … Continue reading →

Yesterday afternoon there was an event at CUNY featuring a panel discussion on Chern-Simons terms. Nothing new there, although it was interesting to hear first-hand from Witten the story of how he came up with the Chern-Simons-Witten theory. One piece … Continue reading →

Lex Fridman’s latest podcast features a nearly four hour long conversation with Edward Frenkel, under the title Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love. Normally I’m fairly allergic to hearing mathematicians or physicists publicly sharing their wisdom … Continue reading →

I recently heard from John Minkowski, whose father Jan Minkowksi was a student of Pauli’s in the late 1940s. He asked if I knew what the specific context of Pauli’s “Not Even Wrong” comment was, and I told him I … Continue reading →

The US particle physics community has been going through a multi-year process designed to lead up this fall to a 10 year strategic plan to be presented to the DOE and the NSF. In particular, this will generate a prioritized … Continue reading →

I just noticed that last semester Edward Witten was teaching Physics 539 at Princeton, a graduate topics course. Since he’s now past the age of 70, at the IAS he is officially retired and an emeritus professor (the IAS is … Continue reading →

Some interviews that readers of this blog may find of interest: David Zierler at the AIP interviews Lee Smolin (April 1, 2021). David Zierler at the AIP interviews Stephon Alexander (June 7, 2021). Alexis Papazoglou at IAI News interviews me … Continue reading →

This posting is about the problems with the idea that you can simply formulate quantum mechanical systems by picking a configuration space, an action functional S on paths in this space, and evaluating path integrals of the form $$\int_{\text{paths}}e^{iS[\text{path}]}$$ Necessity … Continue reading →