Category Archives: Uncategorized

Templeton on ID

I’ve criticized the Templeton Foundation in the past for their endless attempts to blur the line between science and religion, supporting some of the most dubious research in cosmology and physics. To be fair to them, at least they are … Continue reading

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Lawrence Krauss at Cosmic Variance

There’s an interesting guest posting from Lawrence Krauss over at Cosmic Variance. I think I’ll turn off the comment section on this posting here, since if people want to discuss this, it is probably best done over there.

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Superstrings at Princeton

Yesterday, Princeton University, as part of an effort to bring physics to a wide audience during the centennial of Einstein’s great work of 1905, sponsored a performance of Superstrings. This event featured a lecture by Oxford physicist Brian Foster as … Continue reading

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Polyakovfest

Last weekend Princeton held a Special Symposium in honor of Alexander Polyakov’s 60th birthday. Witten talked about his recent work on Langlands duality. He’ll also be speaking about this next week at Rutgers and December 1 and 2 up in … Continue reading

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Latest Freed-Hopkins-Teleman

A wonderful long-promised paper by Dan Freed, Mike Hopkins and Constantin Teleman entitled Loop Groups and Twisted K-theory II has just appeared. They have advertised it in the past under various names such as “K-theory, Loop Groups and Dirac Families”, … Continue reading

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Baez on the Geometry of the Standard Model

John Baez has a very interesting new paper on the arXiv this evening entitled Calabi-Yau Manifolds and the Standard Model. In it he points out that the standard model gauge group (which he carefully defines as SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)/N, where N is … Continue reading

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Krauss New York Times Essay

Lawrence Krauss has an essay in today’s New York Times about science, religion and string theory, covering much the same material discussed here in a recent posting. There are postings about this from Mark Trodden at Cosmic Variance and Lubos … Continue reading

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Weinberg Goes Anthropic

As a commenter here noted last night, and other commenters have discussed in the last posting, Steven Weinberg has just put on the arXiv an article entitled Living in the Multiverse. In it, he correctly points out that theoretical physics … Continue reading

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Nekrasov, Pure Spinors and the Berkovits Superstring

There’s a new paper out tonight by Nikita Nekrasov entitled Lectures on curved beta-gamma system, pure spinors, and anomalies. Motivated by questions about the covariant superstring quantization method being studied in recent years by Berkovits, Nekrasov considers a sigma model … Continue reading

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Cosmological Frontiers

Last week the Perimeter Institute ran a Workshop on Cosmological Frontiers in Fundamental Physics and someone wrote in to point out to me that the talks are now available on-line. Much of the workshop was about mainstream cosmology, especially the … Continue reading

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