Category Archives: Uncategorized

Susskind has posted a new preprint entitled “Cosmic Natural Selection”. It’s just two pages of various attacks on Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological (not cosmic) natural selection. Smolin’s theory is described in detail in his book “The Life of the … Continue reading →

Now string theory is being used to peddle Verizon DSL service (courtesy of Lubos Motl). According to the writers of the advertising copy : “String Theory: The so-called unified theory is gaining credibility among young scientists” Right.

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor at the New Republic, and gives every indication of being a complete moron. His column about Hawking’s recent talk on black hole information loss is a masterpiece of anti-intellectualism. He appears to believe that … Continue reading →

Jacques Distler has something interesting about the prospects for producing black holes at the LHC. This has often been promoted as one of the most exciting possibilities for new physics from the LHC. Evidently it turns out that cosmic-ray experiments … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin has a new preprint discussing the “anthropic principle”. He argues that one standard form of the anthropic principle that has been invoked by proponents of the “Landscape” is not falsifiable and he gives an eloquent explanation of the … Continue reading →

Alexander Polyakov is one of the most prominent figures in theoretical physics and one of the most well-known string theorists at Princeton. He has written a review of his career and of his efforts to understand the relation between gauge … Continue reading →

Hawking gave his widely anticpated talk in Dublin today and reports are on CNN and all sorts of other places in the media. Sean Carroll has managed to get ahold (via Dennis Overbye of the New York Times) of a … Continue reading →

My copy of the proceedings of the conference in honor of Graeme Segal’s 60th birthday finally arrived and I’ve been spending some enjoyable time reading parts of it. To me, the most interesting contributions were the ones by Ben-Zvi and … Continue reading →

Two new books from Cambridge that are now available: A First Course in String Theory by Barton Zwiebach, based on a course on string theory for undergraduates taught at MIT. It’s available for \$42 at Barnes and Noble, sales rank … Continue reading →

Witten is lecturing at a conference in Crete this week and some of his transparencies are already online. He is talking about perturbative gauge theory amplitudes and the idea of interpreting them in terms of strings in twistor space. He … Continue reading →