Category Archives: Uncategorized

Attack on the Main Argument for Supersymmetry

The hundreds of expository articles about supersymmetry written over the last twenty years or more tend to begin by giving one of two arguments to motivate the idea of supersymmetry in particle physics. The first of these goes something like … Continue reading

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More Crackpots

Slate this morning has an article by Jim Holt about an interview with Andrei Linde. In the interview, Linde speculates that universes like ours could be created in a lab, that maybe we live in such a universe, and that … Continue reading

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More From Davis

The last two talks at the Davis conference were quite interesting. Alexandre Givental gave one entitled “Twisted Loop Groups and Gromov-Witten Theory”, which went by way too fast. He has an interpretation of the generating functional for Gromov-Witten invariants that … Continue reading

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The Landscape at Davis

I’m in Nothern California this week, and have been attending some of the talks at the conference at UC Davis celebrating Albert Schwarz’s 70th birthday. The landscape at Davis is exceedingly flat, but this morning Lenny Susskind gave a remarkable … Continue reading

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The Kostant Dirac Operator

Quantum mechanics and representation theory are very closely linked subjects since the Hilbert space of a quantum system with symmetry group G carries a unitary representation of G. To the extent that one has a way of quantizing a classical … Continue reading

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The Fundamental Lemma

For quite a few years now, when I ask my colleague Herve Jacquet about what is going on in his field, he tells me something like: “Maybe someone will soon be able to prove the Fundamental Lemma”. This is a … Continue reading

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The Good Old Days

Alvaro de Rujula has posted on the arXiv under the title “Fifty years of Yang-Mills Theories: a phenomenological point of view” some of his recollections from the mid-seventies. These bring back my own memories of taking a course on particle … Continue reading

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Rumors Available Again

The Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill has a new home. It’s no longer at the University of Washington, now it’s at the College of William and Mary Physics department. Now that it’s available again, the Rumor Mill has the … Continue reading

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HEPAP

HEPAP is the Department of Energy’s “High Energy Physics Advisory Panel”, which holds meetings 3-4 times a year. At these meetings, people from the DOE and NSF report on the latest news about US government funding for particle physcs, and … Continue reading

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Censorship

It seems that the second most important web-site in the particle theory community (the first is obviously the

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