Category Archives: Uncategorized

According to a press release from UCSB, three theoretical physicists have proposed “the most viable test to date for determining whether string theory is on the right track”. This is based on a paper about cosmic strings where the authors … Continue reading →

From one of the comments here I see that the Bogdanovs have put the reports on their theses on the CERN document server. One should perhaps take these with a grain of salt given their source. For instance, I wouldn’t … Continue reading →

Louis de Branges is a mathematician at Purdue who has had a long history of claiming proofs of the Riemann hypothesis. His latest claim has lead to a press release from Purdue. The press release points to what seems to … Continue reading →

A couple years ago two French brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, managed to get Ph.Ds in France and publish several nonsensical papers about quantum gravity in refereed physics journals, several of them rather well-known and prestigious ones. John Baez has … Continue reading →

I was visiting the math department at Dartmouth the past couple days, and gave a colloquium talk there. It’s now available online.

Witten has contributed an essay to the latest issue of Nature about electroweak symmetry breaking. He describes the main conventional ideas about this, ending with the latest anthropic ones. Here are his comments about those: “One approach is the anthropic … Continue reading →

Sean Carroll has some comments about the anti-big bang petition. He also points to Ned Wright’s explanation of what is wrong with various proposed alternatives to the big bang scenario. In particular this explains in detail what the problems with … Continue reading →

Slides used by many of the lecturers at the recent Davis mathematical physics conference in honor of Albert Schwarz are now online.

It’s always a little worrying when this happens, but sometimes I find myself very much agreeing with at least parts of what Lubos Motl has to say. For example see this recent posting to sci.physics.strings. In it Motl argues that … Continue reading →

For many years now the SPIRES database at SLAC has been used to produce a list of the most frequently cited papers during each year. Since 1997 Michael Peskin has been doing this, while at the same time writing up … Continue reading →