Category Archives: Uncategorized

A colleague informs me that the latest New York Review of Books contains a letter from one of the most well-known mathematicians in the U.S.

Most of the talks at Strings 2005 about the landscape have now taken place, although there’s at least one more this afternoon by Dine. Frederik Denef gave a survey talk entitled Constructions and distributions of string vacua. One amusing thing … Continue reading →

The August issue of Discover magazine is out, with a cover story entitled “Is String Theory About to Snap?”. The editors of the magazine describe how they recently became aware of the controversy over string theory when they organized a … Continue reading →

I’d been wondering why Lubos Motl seemed rather subdued in recent months, now one of his recent postings makes some reasons for this clear. Evidently since April he’s been the victim of someone who has been sending him grotesque anonymous … Continue reading →

One of the big experimental HEP conferences, the Lepton-Photon Symposium, has just ended and many of the talks are on-line. This is the 22nd of these conferences which happen every two years. New data from the Tevatron about the top … Continue reading →

Via Steve Hsu, the news from the Wall Street Journal is that Renaissance Technologies is about to launch a new hedge fund that could end up managing $100 billion, 10% of the total managed by all hedge funds today. Renaissance … Continue reading →

The status of Perelman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture is still somewhat confusing. For some background see a previous posting and a later follow-up. Last week the ICTP in Trieste issued a press release entitled Poincare Conjecture Solved, which states … Continue reading →

There’s an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Quantum Diaries Webloggers. It points out that since this project is organized by the high energy physics labs, it “presents a sanitized version of life in high-energy physics”, with … Continue reading →

Via David Goss and Lubos Motl, the news that CNN’s Candy Crowley has a piece about Witten. Unlike Lee Smolin’s Why No “New Einstein”? piece, CNN more or less identifies Witten as the new Einstein. Witten is quoted as giving … Continue reading →

According to today’s New York Times, “string theory allows for a vast number – 10,500 – of possible ‘worlds’ wth different self-consistent sets of laws and constants.” If 10,500 is “vast”, I wonder what 10500 is? I also wonder how … Continue reading →