Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was up in Boston for a few days, and managed to attend a few of the talks at the conference in honor of George Lusztig’s 60th birthday. Lusztig started out his career in geometry and topology; his thesis was … Continue reading →

News about various colliders of various vintages: The Tevatron has been shut down for the past two months for maintenance and various improvements. It should start up again this coming week, for latest news on its status, see here. Seed … Continue reading →

Just upgraded to a new version (2.0.2) of WordPress, and as far as I can tell everything is working normally again. If not, let me know. The one change I plan to make here soon is to try out some … Continue reading →

Frank Wilczek has a new Reference Frame piece in this month’s Physics Today. It’s about the question of whether the parameters of our fundamental physical theory are uniquely determined by abstract principles, or “environmental”. He gives two reasons for suspicion … Continue reading →

Someone wrote in to inform me that Alain Connes has made available at his web-site the full text of his long 1994 book Noncommutative Geometry. This is a rather amazing book, in many ways more of a research document than … Continue reading →

Over the last week or so I’ve heard privately from several very different parties with complaints about the comment section here. The general feeling is that it would be more useful and attract more serious contributions if the level of … Continue reading →

The string theory anthropic landscape point of view has now become so widely accepted and entrenched in the particle theory community that various people are making their claims about having had the idea first. The standard first paper that people … Continue reading →

Some rather strange things are going on at the arXiv, especially in the hep-th section: Besides the usual string theory papers, which just get more and more pointless as time goes on, some very weird things have started to appear … Continue reading →

If you just can’t get enough of pictures of mathematicians, head over to the Oberwolfach Photo Collection. This is a huge collection, which I recently ran across when trying to locate something by Graeme Segal. It also includes a photo … Continue reading →

HEPAP today released a new publication designed to convey to the general public excitement about prospects for particle physics in the coming years. It’s entitled Discovering the Quantum Universe, and it has a companion web-site. Both the web-site and the … Continue reading →