Category Archives: Uncategorized

Today Slashdot brings us the news that Gamma Ray Anomaly Could Test String Theory. As usual with such media claims about the testability of string theory, this is complete nonsense. The story is based on this Scientific American blog posting, … Continue reading →

From Ars Mathematica I learned about an article at Ars Technica describing a scandal involving plagiarism of theoretical physics papers by about 20 different people, some of them students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Many of the … Continue reading →

Nature has an article this week by Jenny Hogan about the K-theory journal situation reported on here, under the heading Strife proves hard to solve for K-theory. The article does show how real journalists do some things much better than … Continue reading →

Blah, blah, more anthropic pseudo-science on hep-th, blah, blah, blah, On the basis of a static support condition depending on the tensile strength of flesh rather than bone, it is reasoned here that our size should be subject to a … Continue reading →

As reported here last week, the editors of the Springer journal K-theory have announced that they (or at least most of them) are resigning and starting up a new journal to be published by Cambridge University Press. Earlier this week, … Continue reading →

Over at Uncertain Principles Chad Orzel is taking a break and turning over his blog temporarily to, among others, string theorist Aaron Bergman, who has started things off with a posting called Ask a String Theorist. In my experience, Aaron … Continue reading →

On the pseudo-science front, the Resonaances blog describes a talk at CERN by string theory enthusiast Jim Cline, about a variant of the anthropic principle called the “Entropic Principle” as “pushing the idea to the edge of absurd.” For beyond … Continue reading →

As anthropic pseudo-science spreads through the particle theory community, I’m finding it harder and harder to tell what’s a joke and what isn’t. Maybe I’m wrong, but I fear that recent examples from hep-th contributors and prominent physics bloggers aren’t … Continue reading →

Last year about this time the entire editorial board of the Elsevier journal Topology resigned, this August it’s the turn of the Springer journal K-theory. The editors of this journal have all resigned, issuing the following statement: Dear fellow mathematicians, … Continue reading →