Category Archives: Uncategorized

World Science Festival

Most of the time the attention paid here to efforts to popularize physics is restricted to grumpy complaints about the hype surrounding string theory as well as the more general dubious phenomenon of scientists promoting things that are more science … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

INSPIRE

Since 1968 SLAC has been maintaining a database of HEP documents called SPIRES, and this has become one of the main tools used by anybody searching the HEP literature. In recent years CERN has developed a much more modern document … Continue reading

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Train of Thought

For the last 15 years the New York City subway has featured “Poetry in Motion”, which places extracts of poetry in subway cars. Starting next month this program will be expanded, joined by Train of Thought, which will add “short … Continue reading

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Bryce DeWitt on Quantum Gravity and String Theory

Last night a preprint appeared on the arXiv from beyond the grave, an undated manuscript entitled Quantum Gravity, Yesterday and Today, found without any indication of its purpose in the files of Bryce DeWitt, who passed away in 2004. DeWitt … Continue reading

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Quick Links

The speakers for Strings 2008 have been announced. One anomaly is that someone from the LQG camp has finally been invited, Carlo Rovelli. Another anomaly is that Witten won’t be speaking. Remember last November’s “unmistakable imprint of another universe” which … Continue reading

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Witten on Dark Energy

Commenter Shantanu pointed to a web-site with talks available on-line from a symposium about Dark Energy now going on at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Yesterday Witten gave a talk entitled “Models of Dark Energy”, where he lays out very … Continue reading

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“So what will you do if string theory is wrong?”

In a new preprint of an article entitled “So what will you do if string theory is wrong?”, to appear in the American Journal of Physics, string theorist Moataz Emam gives a striking answer to the question of the title. … Continue reading

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Anonymity at Cosmic Variance

Over at Cosmic Variance, anonymous comments personally attacking me have been posted recently by someone who identifies themselves only as “string theorist”. I’ve complained to Sean Carroll and his colleagues about their policy of allowing the comment section of their … Continue reading

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Creutz On Rooting

Michael Creutz has a remarkable new preprint out this evening, entitled The Saga of Rooted Staggered Quarks. It explains what has been going on in a rather bitter controversy within the lattice gauge theory community over the last few years. … Continue reading

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This and That

The interactions.org web-site has a new useful feature, Interactions Blog Watch, which aggregates links to recent physics-related blog entries. One of the older such aggregators I know of is Mixed States, but it seems to have stopped on March 15. … Continue reading

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