Category Archives: Uncategorized

The May issue of the Notices of the AMS has memorial articles about two great mathematicians who passed away recently. The first is about Serge Lang and includes contributions from many people, including my Columbia colleague Dorian Goldfeld. When Lang … Continue reading →

At the recent Solvay conference there was extensive discussion of the Landscape, and I’ve already discussed here Michael Douglas’s write-up of his talk on the subject, entitled Understanding the Landscape. Now Joe Polchinksi’s rapporteur talk on the subject has appeared; … Continue reading →

This past week there has been a conference going on in Cambridge called Eurostrings 2006. It’s a bit like the annual “Strings XXXX” conferences, although about half the size and organized just by European institutions that are part of the … Continue reading →

Science writer John Horgan has just written a piece about the Templeton Foundation that is causing a bit of a ruckus. It first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and is also posted a the Edge web-site, where perhaps … Continue reading →

Had an amazing trip, which involved several days of travel through hundreds of miles of spectacular sand dunes in four-wheel drive vehicles operated by impressive Tuareg drivers (no camels). This put me and the group I was traveling with somewhere … Continue reading →

I’m leaving tomorrow night on a trip that will take me away from internet access for a week or more. During this time I won’t be posting anything, or able to manage the comment section, so I’ll be shutting off … Continue reading →

Bert Schroer has sent me a very long and interesting comment for posting here. I’ve put it into a separate web-page. It includes both a lot of history and many different ideas. Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now … Continue reading →

Via Tommaso Dorigo of the CDF collaboration, the news that the Tevatron Electroweak Working Group has released a new analysis of combined CDF and D0 data with the most accurate result so far for the top quark mass: 172.5 +/- … Continue reading →

The SLAC SPIRES yearly list of most frequently cited papers in 2005 is now available. I commented recently on what this was likely to show, quantifying the intellectual collapse of string theory since 1999. There are exactly three post-1999 particle … Continue reading →

The 2006 Templeton Prize of $1.4 million was awarded yesterday to cosmologist John Barrow. Barrow is the author of about 400 scientific articles and nearly 20 popular books. In recent years, one of his interests has been the possibility of … Continue reading →