Category Archives: Uncategorized

Steven Weinberg has a new preprint out entitled Living with Infinities, which is the written version of a recent talk given in memory of Gunnar Källén. Källén was a Swedish mathematical physicist, who died in a plane accident in 1968 … Continue reading →

Lots of wonderful blog postings about math and physics out there worth reading, with a small sample including these: Jester on SUSY and the Higgs. Dmitry Podolsky has some very useful guests posts on various topics, including chirality on the … Continue reading →

I was recently looking up references about the history of Yang-Mills theory in order to write about it here, and one thing I ran into was the Wikipedia entry for Yang-Mills theory. It has three sections, the first two of … Continue reading →

These are dramatic times for news about the US HEP budget, with the FY2009, FY 2010 budgets and stimulus package all coming together at the same time. The final stimulus package was very favorable for DOE and NSF, providing an … Continue reading →

When learning about various ideas in mathematics and physics, I’m always fascinated by the history of these ideas and eagerly read whatever I can find on the subject. Partly this is because my understanding of ideas is often enlightened by … Continue reading →

Last Friday at the KITP there was a celebration of Stanley Mandelstam’s 80th birthday, with talks available here, and some messages from other physicists here. Geoffrey Chew recalls how Berkeley hired Mandelstam away from Columbia, where no one was very … Continue reading →

It now appears that the final US stimulus bill will include very large amounts of spending on scientific research. See here for a copy of the conference agreement. It has \$3 billion for the NSF, \$1.6 billion for the DOE … Continue reading →

Yesterday Joe Polchinski gave a lunch-time talk at the KITP on the topic of What is String Theory? No answer to the question, but he provided an outline of three topics being discussed at the current KITP workshop program that … Continue reading →

I’m trying to finish writing up something about equivariant cohomology for the BRST project, slowed down by realizing there was something interesting about this that I didn’t understand. Soon that should be sorted out…. In the meantime, here are various … Continue reading →

After the recent news that being a mathematician is the best job in the US, next month’s Popular Science magazine has come out with a list of the worst jobs, not overall, but in the sciences. “Theoretical Physicist” makes the … Continue reading →