Category Archives: Uncategorized

The KITP in Santa Barbara is having a conference in honor of its 25th anniversary on the topic of “The Future of Physics”. Some of yesterday’s talks are already online. I’ve been watching Weinberg’s talk on “Where do we Stand?” … Continue reading →

Well, my prediction of who would win this year’s Nobel prize in physics turned out to be correct. No, I didn’t have any inside information about this at all. I suppose I should mention that many of my friends will … Continue reading →

Last week I was in a bookstore and ran across a new book by Emanuel Derman called My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance. Derman got a particle theory Ph. D. here at Columbia in 1973 when … Continue reading →

Over at sci.physics.strings there’s the scary sight of Lubos Motl agreeing with me in a posting about “Stringy Naturalness”. Well, maybe he isn’t directly saying he agrees with me, but “It would be too difficult for me to pretend that … Continue reading →

There’s an interesting new preprint by the historian of mathematics Erhard Scholz about the early history of the use of representation theory in quantum mechanics. Immediately after the beginnings of quantum mechanics in 1925, several people started to realize that … Continue reading →

A new preprint by Michael Douglas indicates that, at least this week, the latest “predictions” from string theory are for: 1. No large extra dimensions. 2. No low scale supersymmetry. So it looks like the “prediction” of the string theory … Continue reading →

Thomas Larsson wrote in a comment mentioning a news story that appeared early this past summer in the Deseret Morning News (yes, that’s Deseret, not Desert; this is a name Mormons use to refer to Utah). The news story is … Continue reading →

Lubos Motl has an interesting post on sci.physics.stringsthat gives a detailed explanation of the current state of string field theory. One way of motivating quantum field theory is to start with a “first-quantized” quantum theory of particles (perhaps defined by … Continue reading →

This month is the 50th anniversary of the formal founding of the CERN laboratory near Geneva. There’s a very interesting article in Physics World about CERN and its future plans. LHC construction seems to be proceeding more or less on … Continue reading →