Category Archives: Uncategorized

The IAS in Princeton announced today that Robbert Dijkgraaf will take over from Peter Goddard as director starting next summer. Like Goddard, Dijkgraaf has devoted much of his career to string theory, more specifically the formal side of the subject, … Continue reading →

An explanation of something that readers of this and other related blogs may have run into recently: An ex-boyfriend of a close personal friend of mine has been posting here and elsewhere repulsive and delusional material about the two of … Continue reading →

Via Steve Hsu, at the AIP Center for History of Physics, there’s a transcript of an interview with Sidney Coleman from 1977. It’s provocative and amusing, like the man himself, as well as informative history. Go and read the whole … Continue reading →

With the Solvay Centenary conference now finished for over a week, some information has been posted about it on the Solvay Institute web-site, where you can see a group picture of the attendees on the main page. Lisa Randall’s comment … Continue reading →

Thomas Love pointed me to a wonderful article from last year by Rudolf Haag. It’s more or less a short memoir of his scientific career, entitled Some people and some problems met in half a century of commitment to mathematical … Continue reading →

The Perimeter Institute announced yesterday a new partnership with the Templeton Foundation, in the form of something to be called the Templeton Frontiers Program. The research areas to be supported are “quantum foundations and information, foundational questions in cosmology, and … Continue reading →

According to World News Forecast, 11:11am on 11/11/11 could, if Uri Geller is right, be a portal to another universe. This is from Geller’s web-page on the subject: String theory is said to be the theory of everything. It is … Continue reading →

The first Solvay conference was in 1911 (at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels, where I stayed one night of my recent trip to Belgium, without knowing the history), attended by the great men of the early days of quantum theory, … Continue reading →

There’s a nice article this week in Nature about AdS/CMT, entitled String Theory Finds a Bench Mate. According to the article, the whole thing is (partly) my fault: But in 2006, string theory took a public battering in two popular … Continue reading →

The latest New York Review of Books has an article by Steven Weinberg entitled Symmetry: A ‘Key to Nature’s Secrets’. It’s a bit unusual for the NYRB, since it is both scientifically more technical than usual for them (coming from … Continue reading →