Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

There a new article on Slate about string theory and my colleague Brian Greene. Also some commentary about it on David Appell’s weblog Quark Soup.

Michael Atiyah and Graeme Segal have a new foundational paper out on twisted K-theory. It doesn’t have too many examples or applications, but lays a rigorous foundation for a certain point of view on the subject. Section 5 is the … Continue reading →

Throughout the mid-to-late 80s, the NSF and other organizations would periodically issue alarmist reports about an impending dangerous shortage of scientists and engineers in the U.S. These projections for shortages turned out to be utter nonsense, as anyone who looked … Continue reading →

The buzz is that Hawking has a new idea about how to resolve the “Black Hole Information Paradox”, the well known incompatibility between standard ideas about black holes and the unitary time evolution of the wave function that is fundamental … Continue reading →

One contributor to the comments here (JC) has pointed out that Susskind has withdrawn from the arXiv his recent paper on the stupendous Landscape of sting theory. This is pretty unusual, but often when it happens the author puts in … Continue reading →