Category Archives: Uncategorized

Some things I’ve run across in the last few days: This month’s Scientific American is devoted to The Future of Physics, a special report made up of three excellent articles on the LHC machine, the standard model and its discontents, … Continue reading →

Last summer I wrote here about a plagiarism scandal involving more than 60 arXiv preprints, more than thirty of which were refereed and published in at least 18 different physics journals, some of them quite prestigious ones (see also the … Continue reading →

Every year around this time the Edge web-site posts responses from a large number of scientists to some particular question. This year the question is “What have you changed your mind about? Why?”, and the results should be posted tomorrow. … Continue reading →

Theoretical physics and mathematics are much cheaper to fund than experimental particle physics. I don’t know yet what the implications of the FY 2008 budget are for these fields, but it appears that they are not facing large cuts like … Continue reading →

David Vogan was visiting Columbia last week, giving the Ritt Lectures, on the topic of Geometry and Representations of Reductive Groups. He has made available the slides from his lectures here. Vogan’s talks concentrated on describing the so-called “orbit method” … Continue reading →

I’ve just finished reading a wonderful new book by theoretical physicist Peter Freund, entitled A Passion for Discovery. Freund grew up in Romania, and began his career as a physicist in Europe during the 1950s, emigrating to the US during … Continue reading →

Various particle physics-related science fiction and fantasy news: Discover has an interview with Kip Thorne, who is working with Steven Spielberg on a science fiction film tentatively entitled Interstellar for release in 2009. The plot evidently involves the novel idea … Continue reading →

There’s a long and interesting profile of Jim Simons on the Bloomberg web-site. It begins with him being told he has a call from Harvard string theorist Cumrun Vafa. Unclear whether Vafa was calling to talk about something related to … Continue reading →

Over at bloggingheads.tv today, John Horgan and George Johnson discuss the various excesses of recent physics news reporting covered here over the last week or so (Lisi-mania, evidence of other universes, observation of the CC causing ours to end, etc.), … Continue reading →

Tomorrow morning I’ll head down to Princeton to attend the conference on Gauge Theory and Representation Theory at the IAS. Unfortunately I had to miss the first day of the conference (today), since I would have liked to have heard … Continue reading →