Category Archives: Uncategorized

One thing I’ve learned in life is that human beings are creatures very much obsessed with social hierarchy, and academics are even more obsessed with this than most people. So, any public rankings that involve oneself and the institutions one … Continue reading →

During the past year Erik Verlinde has made a splash (most recently in the New York Times). with his claim that the reason we don’t understand gravity is that it is an emergent phenomenon, an “entropic force”. Now he and … Continue reading →

As the date for announcement of the 2010 Fields Medals approaches, gossip about who the winners might be has been circulating. Math Overflow is by far the best internet site for authoritative discussion between knowledgeable mathematicians, but, unlike this site, … Continue reading →

There has been some recent progress on increasing the LHC luminosity. Recent physics fills have peak luminosities around 2.5 x 1030cm-2s-1, total integrated luminosity is above 500 nb-1, with a goal of getting to 1000 nb-1=1 pb-1 this week. The … Continue reading →

In conjunction with his receipt of the Newton Medal, Edward Witten gave a public talk in London (now available on-line here), and an interview (available as part of a pod-cast here). Witten’s talk was a rather polemical argument for string … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →