Category Archives: Uncategorized

Five years ago the 20th anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution” was being celebrated, and I wrote some postings about this history (see here, here and here). This month is the quarter-century anniversary, and I haven’t seen any evidence of … Continue reading →

CERN just issued a press release announcing the decision about the energy for the initial LHC run: 3.5 TeV/beam. The procedure for the 2009 start-up will be to inject and capture beams in each direction, take collision data for a … Continue reading →

Steven Weinberg was visiting CERN recently and gave a talk entitled The Quantum Theory of Fields: Effective or Fundamental? He discussed the ups and downs of the “market price” of quantum field theory, showing a decline since a peak in … Continue reading →

If you want to keep up with the latest news on the LHC status, tomorrow at 3pm Geneva time there will be a webcast of a talk by Steve Myers. The abstract reads: The status of the LHC will be … Continue reading →

In a couple days I’ll be leaving for a week-long trip to Riga and St. Petersburg. I’ll be in St. Petersburg from July 5-8, and will give a talk on BRST and Dirac Cohomology at a conference there. I’m finishing … Continue reading →

At the height of the string wars a couple years ago, one of the participants was a mysterious anonymous commenter going under the name “Gina”. Earlier this year Gil Kalai wrote to me to reveal that he was the person … Continue reading →

As far as academics are concerned, summer has started, which means that there are lots and lots of conferences going on. The past couple weeks we’ve had two here in the Columbia math department, one in algebraic geometry, and another … Continue reading →

This past weekend the city of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne organized a science festival entitled La tête dans les étoiles; les pieds sur terre! It featured Lubos Motl speaking on “Physics at the Planck Scale”, and the Bogdanoff brothers on “The Beginning of … Continue reading →