Category Archives: Uncategorized

Last Wednesday night, a paper appeared on the arXiv that spelled very bad news for the whole “Landscape” scenario of how to get physics out of string theory. This paper produced what appears to be an infinite number of possible … Continue reading →

The US High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) is meeting in Washington yesterday and today, and some of the presentations are already available on-line. These include one from the DOE Office of High Energy Physics which notes that, given budgetary … Continue reading →

Shamit Kachru (described by Lenny Susskind as the “master Rube Goldberg architect”) and collaborators have a new paper out this evening on flux compactifications, one that in a rational world should finish off the subject completely. Recall that Kachru is … Continue reading →

Someone wrote to me today to tell me that Harvard’s Nima Arkani-Hamed recently gave a lecture in Washington with the title “String Theory — Can We Test It?”. Somehow, I suspect that his lecture didn’t really give an honest answer … Continue reading →

This past weekend I was in Cambridge and attended many of the talks at the JDG conference held at Harvard. The conference was nominally in honor of Shiing-Shen Chern, who died late last year, so many speakers made some connection … Continue reading →

Quite a few people have written in to point out to me a recent paper by some condensed matter physicists about the possibility of trapping a fermionic atomic gas in a vortex inside a Bose-Einstein condensate. As far as I … Continue reading →

When I first started studying quantum mechanics I read quite a bit about the remarkable history of the subject, especially about the brief period from 1925-27 when the subject grew dramatically out of the incoherent ideas of the old quantum … Continue reading →

I’ve recently run across various interesting mathematically oriented sites, each with some connection to physics: Alain Connes now has a web-site. He’s now a professor at Vanderbilt University as well as at the College de France. I can see him … Continue reading →

Lubos Motl has taken to signing some of his postings with “leashed”, and Capitalist Imperialist Pig has speculated that “My dark suspicion is that he might have gotten caught in a PC violation in the Summers Affair, forcing him to … Continue reading →

For the last couple days students at Princeton have been protesting the Republican’s plan to invoke the “nuclear option” and stop Democrats from filibustering a small number of Bush’s judicial nominees. This protest has taken the form of organizing a … Continue reading →