Category Archives: Uncategorized

A few short items: Nature has an editorial this week summarizing the situation with the 750 GeV possible diphoton bump. It mentions a new paper analyzing related data (the number of theory papers on this as a function of time). … Continue reading →

Quanta magazine has an intriguing article by Siobhan Roberts out about Michael Atiyah, and what he’s up to these days. It mentions some new ideas about twistor theory I hadn’t heard about, that emerged from a conversation with Penrose, which … Continue reading →

Part two of Gerald Alper’s piece at Smashpipe is now available there, with the title Who’s Winning the String Wars and Why Should You Care?, and some more substantive material than in part one. One of the great things about … Continue reading →

The online magazine Smashpipe has the first part of a two-part article written by Gerald Alper, who recently came up here to Columbia to talk to me about string theory/etc. It was an interesting conversation, so I’m curious to see … Continue reading →

Since Grothendieck’s death somewhat more than a year ago, quite a lot of new material about him and his mathematics has become available. Visit the Grothendieck Circle to find a lot of this, with just one example some new chapters … Continue reading →

I think I can confidently predict that tomorrow morning either one of two things will happen: The first observation of gravitational waves will be reported by the LIGO experiment. A large fraction of the scientific community will be really, really … Continue reading →

Last night I got to attend a major event of the Manhattan social season, a party celebrating the fact that the Stacks Project has reached the milestone of 5000 pages. As far as anyone knows, no one has ever printed … Continue reading →

Slides from my talk at Rutgers are now available here. The idea was just to advertise to physicists there the point of view that is all too familiar to regular readers here. The final speculative comments about relations to mathematics … Continue reading →

Not much time for blogging at the moment, with one reason that I’ll be giving a talk at Rutgers on Wednesday, and need to get that prepared. A few quick items: As some commenters have mentioned here, talks from the … Continue reading →

I recognize that this is a genre that is a bit tired, and arguably in poor taste, but the commentary on the HEP theory postdoc job market in the video Hitler doesn’t get a postdoc in High Energy Theory is … Continue reading →