Category Archives: Uncategorized

For some interesting comments by Nima Arkani-Hamed about his model-building activities, followed by some of my own, take a look here. Update: Jacques Distler has some comments on the Arkani-Hamed et. al. paper.

The world of particle physics web logging expanded by about an order of magnitude today, as a new web-site called Quantum Diaries came on-line. The idea seems to be to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s remarkable 1905 papers by … Continue reading →

As of yesterday, I’ve started deleting comments from this weblog if they seem to me to be completely off-topic or make no sense. By the end of last year, the comment section here had begun to turn into something I … Continue reading →

In recent years, as it has become clear that string theory can never be used to predict anything about the real world, string theorists have reacted to this state of affairs in various often bizarre ways. Tonight there’s a new … Continue reading →

A preprint by Andrei Marshakov and Antti Niemi appeared on hep-th this evening making a remarkable claim. According to this preprint, a few weeks before passing away recently at the age of 93, Shiing-Shen Chern completed a preprint entitled “On … Continue reading →

Greg Moore has written an article for the latest Notices of the AMS entitled “WHAT IS… a Brane?”. He begins by noting that “The term ‘brane’ has come to mean many things to many people” and one of the difficulties … Continue reading →

Several people wrote in this morning to tell me about Phil Anderson’s comments about string theory that appeared in the New York Times today. These originally come from John Brockman’s “Edge” web-site where he has gathered responses from more than … Continue reading →

I haven’t posted anything new here in a while, with the holidays and trying to get over a bad cold keeping me otherwise occupied. Partly because of this the comments section has been to some degree taken over by people … Continue reading →

Now for some comic relief: A new issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. It contains an entertaining article entitled Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor with many examples of mathematical humor. Physicists also put in an … Continue reading →

There’s an interview with Andy Strominger in the Calcutta newspaper The Telegraph. Strominger was presumably in India for the string theory conference there this past week. The thing I found interesting about the interview was how skeptical the interviewer was, … Continue reading →