Category Archives: Uncategorized

Last night a preprint by Xian-Jin Li appeared on the arXiv, claiming a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. Preprints claiming such a proof have been pretty common, and always wrong. Most of them are obviously implausible, invoking a few pages … Continue reading →

This week there’s a Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, devoted to physics. Many of the talks can be viewed on-line. From 3-5pm today (Lindau time) there will be a session devoted to a panel discussion of expectations for the LHC. … Continue reading →

A workshop in Paris/Saclay is taking place this week entitled Wonders of Gauge Theory and Supergravity and the talks are now online. They show that some exciting new things have been happening in the study of gauge theory and supergravity … Continue reading →

Today’s Bloggingheads.tv diavlog features Sean Carroll and philosopher of science David Albert, discussing a variety of issues. Albert tells about his unfortunate experience with the What the Bleep? film, a good example of why it’s not always a good idea … Continue reading →

The relationship between mathematics and physics is a topic that has always fascinated me, and today I noticed two interesting blog postings related to the topic. The first was Ben Webster’s posting inspired by a recent XKCD comic. The discussion … Continue reading →

This week I’m in Montreal attending a conference in honor of Raoul Bott (who I wrote about in some detail here a couple years ago). On the first day of the conference, a documentary film about Bott made by his … Continue reading →

I’ve been known to claim that string theory makes no experimental predictions, so this evening thought I better take a look at a preprint that just appeared entitled GUTs and Exceptional Branes in F-theory – II: Experimental Predictions. The abstract … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →