Category Archives: Uncategorized

According to the New York Times, Scarsdale High School has decided to get rid of their Advanced Placement classes, including AP Physics, replacing them with a new curriculum that cost “$40,000 to bring in 25 professors from Harvard, Yale, New … Continue reading →

There’s a new preprint on the arXiv from Polyakov, entitled From Quarks to Strings, in which he tells the story of his involvement with string theory over the years. He begins: In the sixties I was not much interested in … Continue reading →

This is the time of year during which a large number of physicists and mathematicians must turn their attention to the problem of finding employment for next fall. Physics Today has a jobs site here, which has a new posting … Continue reading →

I briefly met John Hagelin when I was an undergraduate. At the time he was a Harvard particle theory graduate student, soon to get his degree and start a quite respectable career in the subject. His biography on his web-site … Continue reading →

I just recently got my hands on a copy of the new Princeton Companion to Mathematics, and I fear that this is likely to seriously impact my ability to get things done for a while, as I devote too much … Continue reading →

String theory in general seems to have gone very quiet recently, but attempts to intensively promote the string theory landscape view of fundamental physics show no signs of slowing down at all. The Princeton Center for Theoretical Science is running … Continue reading →

The hypothetical field with one element (known as Fun) now has its own blog, ceci n’est pas un corps. Among the many things of interest, there’s a link to a video of Alain Connes explaining his recent paper with Consani … Continue reading →

Half of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Yoichiro Nambu for his work on spontaneous symmetry breaking, the other half to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the CKM matrix as an explanation of CP breaking. A detailed … Continue reading →

Discussion of quantum gravity at a level similar to that of parts of the professional physics community makes it to prime-time TV: Update: I should have credited where I first saw reference to this (no, I don’t normally watch this … Continue reading →

Steve Hsu has a recent posting Survivor: theoretical physics, which links to data about the theoretical particle physics job market compiled by Erich Poppitz from listings on the Theoretical Particle Physics Rumor Mill web-site. Back in 2001-2 I also spent … Continue reading →