Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was wondering why there were lots and lots of hits on this weblog today coming from Google searches for “first evidence for string theory”. It looks like the answer is this lead article from the latest New Scientist magazine. … Continue reading →

Tom Banks has a new preprint out, entitled Landskepticism: or Why Effective Potentials Don’t Count String Models. In it he argues against the idea that one can use effective potentials to study the supposed “Landscape” of different vacuum states of … Continue reading →

The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics gave their Nobel lectures in Stockholm on Wednesday. The lectures of David Gross and Frank Wilczek are available on-line, for some reason that of David Politzer isn’t, at least not yet. … Continue reading →

This morning’s New York Times has a long and prominently placed article about the 20th anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution”. The Times has a long history of producing overhyped uncritical articles about string theory, for a classic example, see … Continue reading →

A recent issue of Science magazine has an article about the “Strings and the Real World” workshop at Aspen this past summer, entitled String Theory Gets Real — Sort Of. A more accurate title for the article might be “String … Continue reading →

The second talk I heard yesterday at the Institute was by Chris Woodward from Rutgers. What he was talking about was a conjectural formula whose origins go back to a truly amazing paper by Witten from 1992 entitled Two Dimensional … Continue reading →

I was down in Princeton at the Institute yesterday and heard two interesting talks. The first was the beginning of a series of four lectures by Paul Baum about the Baum-Connes conjecture, the second was by Chris Woodward about “equivariant … Continue reading →

An excellent review article about the state of the proof of the Poincare conjecture by my colleague John Morgan has recently appeared. For more background on this, see an earlier posting. Morgan is a topologist, and his article contains an … Continue reading →

The U.S. Congress has finally gotten around to producing a budget for fiscal year 2005. Some information about the budget numbers for scientific research is available here and here. The NSF budget for research and related activities is being cut … Continue reading →

For a depressing look at where theoretical physics is headed, see this new article from Time magazine. I agree with the analysis of it posted here.