Category Archives: Uncategorized

Plagiarism Scandal Today’s Nature has an article by Geoff Brumfiel with more details on the plagiarism scandal described here. At last count it involves 15 authors, 67 papers on the arXiv, of which about 35 were refereed and published, in … Continue reading →

There are yet more hep-th articles on the anthropic principle this week, following recent ones devoted to the implications for fundamental physics of the heights of giraffes and sizes of brontosaurus brains. The TASI summer school designed to train particle … Continue reading →

The September issue of Physics World is out, featuring a 13 page advertising supplement for string theory which is pretty much unadulterated hype. The same issue includes an editorial which takes the point of view that the only problem with … Continue reading →

All sorts of schools and workshops occurring this summer have been putting up materials from the talks on-line. Sometimes this is just an audio recording of the talk, which can be very frustrating if you’re interested in the details of … Continue reading →

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 →