Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

To the Editor: Paul Davies, in his Op-Ed piece Taking Science on Faith, uses recent untestable speculation about multiple universes motivated by string theory to claim that “the mood has now shifted considerably” among physicists. He characterizes physics as being, … Continue reading →

While it’s not one of my main goals in life, I’m all in favor of the idea of popularizing science and making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. But sometimes I do wonder about the … Continue reading →

It’s been unusually long since my last posting, with the main reasons being that Not much has been happening on the math/physics front… I’ve been busy learning more about geometric Langlands, which is a daunting subject. I keep intending to … Continue reading →

The past two days I’ve been at a conference here in Lisbon organized by the Gulbenkian Foundation on the ostensible topic of Is Science Near Its Limits? The Gulbenkian is probably the most well-known and best-funded cultural organization in Portugal, … Continue reading →

Robert Shrock of Stony Brook sent me the following to post as a response to one of the comments on the latest posting. With his permission I’m putting it here as a separate posting, since I think it’s a valuable … Continue reading →