Category Archives: Uncategorized

The latest Cosmic Log column on msnbc.com concerns Lawrence Krauss’s new book Hiding in the Mirror and the author asked Krauss a question I’m expecting that physicists will be hearing more and more often as time goes on: “Why is … Continue reading →

Sir Michael Atiyah is here in the United States this month. Evidently he was at the Institute in Princeton last week during the Deligne conference, talking to Witten. Last Friday he gave a public talk at an AMS conference at … Continue reading →

There have been several recent interesting talks at the KITP in Santa Barbara as part of their program this semester on Mathematical Structures in String Theory. Last week Greg Moore gave a beautiful talk on Mathematical Aspects of Fluxes. It’s … Continue reading →

The latest issue of Nature has an essay on Hermann Weyl by Frank Wilczek. The essay mainly advertises Weyl’s book Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, originally published in 1926, but updated for the English translation in 1949. I’m embarassed … Continue reading →

Yesterday I went down to the Institute in Princeton with my friend Oisin McGuinness to attend one day of a conference in honor of Pierre Deligne that is going on there this week. Deligne has spent most of his career … Continue reading →

To some extent, if one wants to understand some of the recent history of physics, one should take into account important demographic trends in the subject. For particle physics in the U.S., in recent years the Particle Data Group has … Continue reading →

This week there’s a large conference in Potsdam on non-perturbative/background independent quantum gravity called Loops ’05. The programme is on-line, and there is live-blogging from Robert Helling. Update: String theorist Robert Helling has more coverage of the conference. This includes … Continue reading →

A commenter here wrote in to point out that Margaret Wertheim, a science columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has a new piece entitled Physics strings us along. She discusses Lisa Randall’s new book as an example of physics that … Continue reading →

An assortment of news and links that may be of interest: The Tevatron has achieved a record luminosity for a hadron collider: 1.41×1032cm-2sec-1. This is higher than the best luminosity at the ISR at CERN, and that was a proton-proton … Continue reading →

Witten gave a lecture on the beach at Stony Brook on the topic of gauge theory and the Langlands program two months ago, and lecture notes are now available. Lubos Motl has a posting about this, where he promotes the … Continue reading →