Monthly Archives: July 2006

Susskind on KQED

Someone wrote in to tell me that KQED this morning had Leonard Susskind on to discuss string theory and his book The Cosmic Landscape. Most of the program consisted of him promoting his usual line about the string theory anthropic … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 58 Comments

Templeton Funding for Physics Research

The Templeton-funded FQXI organization has announced today the awarding of 30 grants totalling more than $2 million dollars for foundational research in physics. On the one hand I’ve always been dubious about this organization since it is funded by a … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 43 Comments

Conferences, etc.

Lattice 2006, the big yearly conference on lattice gauge theory, is going on the week in Tucson. The program is here, and both plenary and parallel session talks are being posted. Georg von Hippel is blogging from the conference, his … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Latest on Poincare

A new 473-page paper by Gang Tian and my colleague John Morgan that gives a complete proof of the Poincare conjecture based upon the argument outlined by Grigori Perelman (which carries out the program of my other Columbia colleague Richard … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 106 Comments

Various and Sundry

Since it’s summer, lots of conferences going on: The Institute in Princeton has its usual summer program designed to train graduate students and postdocs in string theory. The schedule and lecture notes are here. On the opposite coast, with an … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

The String Ideology

If you want to get an understanding of the ideology that many string theorists subscribe to, you should check out Lubos Motl’s latest posting. Besides the usual dismissal of non-believers as idiots, incompetents and crackpots (an attitude that unfortunately seems … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 54 Comments

Equivariant Cohomology

The International Congress of Mathematicians will be taking place in Madrid relatively soon, in late August. One tradition at this conference is the announcement of the Fields Medals, and I’m getting embarassed that I’m not hearing any authoritative rumors about … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

This Week’s Hype

This week’s string theory hype is embedded in a story by Michael Schirber about the possibility of variation of fundamental constants that has appeared on msnbc.com, foxnews.com, and Slashdot. According to Schirber: A popular alternative to relativity, which assumes that … Continue reading

Posted in This Week's Hype | 62 Comments

Interviews With Atiyah and Gell-Mann

A correspondent wrote in to tell me about a wonderful web-site, called People’s Archive.  Their idea is to do in-depth interviews at a peer-to-peer level with the great thinkers and creators of our time.  They’ve been doing this for a … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Quick Links

Taking off tomorrow for a long weekend, internet access may be spotty. Here are some things that may be of interest: HEPAP is meeting today and tomorrow, the presentations given at the meeting are available here.  JoAnne Hewett is there … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments