Category Archives: Uncategorized

There’s a fascinating interview with Atiyah and Singer now on-line. It was conducted in May at the time they were awarded the Abel prize. The interview and Atiyah and Singer’s acceptance speeches are also available in video form. The whole … Continue reading →

Over at Preposterous Universe Sean Carroll has some comments on the anthropic principle and the landscape. He describes one extreme of the spectrum of opinion about this as people who think the whole thing is completely non-scientific, giving what he … Continue reading →

Witten is giving a colloquium talk next week at Princeton on the topic of “Supersymmetry Pro or Con”. His talk is a last-minute replacement for one about “Recent Results from WMAP” by Lyman Page. WMAP was supposed to report the … Continue reading →

This weblog thing is getting out of control. It seems that Frank Wilczek’s wife has one, as well as his daughter. What about you, Frank?

Witten’s talk this morning at the KITP on “The Future of String Theory” is now available. He only talked for about fifteen minutes and then took some questions. I thought it was a rather weird performance. Not only did Witten … Continue reading →

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 →