Category Archives: Uncategorized

Various and Sundry

It seems that Jean-Pierre Serre now spends his time commenting on blogs. For those interested in particle physics history, there’s an interesting article by George Zweig here about his role in the discovery of quarks (which he called “aces”). There’s … Continue reading

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Perelman Turns Down Millennium Prize

The Clay Mathematics Institute today announced that Perelman has turned down the one million dollar Millennium prize: On June 8-9 CMI held a conference in Paris to celebrate the resolution of the Poincaré conjecture by Grigoriy Perelman. Dr. Perelman has … Continue reading

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Summer School

This is the time of the year when young particle physicists usually want to go to school, more precisely, a “summer school” held in some pleasant location. These typically have a series of survey lectures on the hot topics of … Continue reading

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String Theory Fan

One of the weirder battles of the String Theory wars became known to some as “trackbackgate”, referring to arguments over the arXiv’s policy of not allowing trackbacks to this blog. I’ve mercifully forgotten the details of the story, other than … Continue reading

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Various and Sundry

Last week’s symposium in Paris on Symmetry, Duality and Cinema now has talks available on-line. These include a very nice survey talk by Edward Frenkel, including some comments on his recent work with Langlands and Ngo that involves an analog … Continue reading

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Predictions From David Gross

Video of David Gross’s talk at the Physics at the LHC 2010 conference is now available. He devotes much of the talk to reviewing predictions he made back in 1993 of what would happen by 2008, and making new predictions … Continue reading

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Millennium Prize Update

The Clay Mathematics Institute this past week sponsored a conference in Paris devoted to celebrating the proof of the Poincare Conjecture. This included a short ceremony on June 8th awarding the Millennium prize to Perelman, which included several laudations explaining … Continue reading

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Not In Our Lifetimes

A report from one of last Saturday’s events at the World Science Festival has string theorists Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru admitting that they’d be surprised to see experimental evidence for string theory in their lifetimes: John Hockenberry, the panel’s … Continue reading

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Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman

The Science Channel is starting up yet another show on physics tonight, with Michio Kaku’s Sci-Fi Science and Into the Universe with Steven Hawking being joined by Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. The topics being covered by Freeman are … Continue reading

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Prerequisites

The Abstruse Goose recently provided an excellent summary of how to go about learning string theory. It starts with “String Theory for Dummies”, here. Tommaso Dorigo’s latest say of the week is somehow relevant.

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