Category Archives: Strings 2XXX

Strings 2023

For much of the past week, I’ve been attending off and on (on Zoom) the Strings 2023 conference. This year it’s in a hybrid format, with 200 participants in person at the Perimeter Institute, and another 1200 or so on … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 18 Comments

Strings Black Holes 2022

Each summer for nearly a quarter-century there has been a big yearly conference bringing together the string theory community. I’ve often written about these conferences on the blog, see here. This year’s version will be held next week in Vienna, … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 31 Comments

Deterioration of the World’s Thinking About the Deepest Stringy Ideas

For quite a few years now, I’ve been mystified about what is going on in string theory, as the subject has become dominated by AdS/CFT inspired work which has nothing to do with either strings or any visible idea about … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 9 Comments

Strings 2021

Strings 2021 started today, program is available here. Since it’s online only, talks are much more accessible than usual (and since it’s free, over 2000 people have registered to in principle participate via Zoom). Talks are available for watching every … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 34 Comments

Prospects for contact of string theory with experiments

Nima Arkani-Hamed today gave a “vision talk” at Strings 2019, entitled Prospects for contact of string theory with experiments which essentially admitted there are no such prospects. He started by joking that he had been assigned this talk topic by … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 20 Comments

Strings 2018 Panel Discussion

A panel discussion at the Strings 2018 conference ended by addressing audience questions, and this seemed to me to give some insight into where string theory is now. I noticed that the Youtube video comes with an auto-generated transcript, so … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX, Swampland | 18 Comments

This Week’s Hype

New Scientist today has a feature article headlined How to think about… The multiverse The idea of an infinite multitude of universes is forced on us by physics. It starts off quoting Sean Carroll: “One of the most common misconceptions … Continue reading

Posted in Fake Physics, Multiverse Mania, Strings 2XXX, Swampland | 17 Comments

HEP Physics News

ICHEP 2016 starts in Chicago this week. Talks about the new diphoton results are scheduled for 9am (Chicago time) Friday. There will also be talks later in the day at CERN (5pm Geneva time), scheduled as part of this summer’s … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX, Uncategorized | 19 Comments

String Sociology

If you’re interested in the various sorts of internal divisions these days among people doing what gets called “string theory”, you might want to take a look at this blog entry and the discussion there with string phenomenologist Joseph Conlon. … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 8 Comments

Strings 2015

Strings 2015 gets underway in Bangalore tomorrow, and so far the press coverage I’ve seen consists just of two articles that aren’t what I’d guess string theorists would like to see: In The theory that may have been stringing scientists … Continue reading

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 16 Comments