Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

I’ve heard reports from Harvard that yesterday and today Heisuke Hironaka has been giving talks in the math department there, claiming to have a proof that singularities of algebraic varieties can be resolved for any dimension in characteristic p. This … Continue reading →

Besides the meltdown in the financial markets, perhaps of more concern to physicists is a meltdown at CERN, specifically in the connection between two magnets during powering tests being conducted at 11:17 last Friday the 19th. Here’s the daily report … Continue reading →

This posting will quickly veer far off the usual topics of this blog into political issues that I normally avoid like the plague. For once, the issues involved seem important enough to interrupt your regularly-scheduled programming. I hope to not … Continue reading →

There are two new particle theory blogs that I’ve noticed recently: Shores of the Dirac Sea, where David Berenstein and Moshe Rozali are blogging and the Physics Anti-Crackpot Blog, by an anonymous author at CERN. I don’t know who this … Continue reading →

Some wag at the Wall Street Journal put the headline Don’t Buy Into the Supercollider Hype on today’s Op-Ed piece by Michio Kaku about the LHC, which describes its significance as follows: The LHC might shed light on the “theory … Continue reading →