Category Archives: Uncategorized

There’s a story in this Sunday’s New York Times television section describing how Ed Witten pitched a story idea to the people who make the new TV show Numb3rs. According to one of the show’s executive producers, Cheryl Heuton, “Ed … Continue reading →

Last night ABC News ran a two-hour primetime special on The UFO Phenomenon — Seeing is Believing. As part of this special program, they interviewed “one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists”, who, according to Bob Park, “looked a lot … Continue reading →

I recently acquired a copy of the new volume 6 of Atiyah’s collected works, which contains things he wrote from the late eighties until very recently (the latest article is his joint paper with Graeme Segal on twisted K-theory). Unfortunately … Continue reading →

In a Stanford University press release today, Susskind promotes the “Landscape”, calling each different vacuum state a “pocket universe”. Referring to people like David Gross who oppose the idea, Susskind says: “More and more as time goes on, the opponents … Continue reading →

By far the most important event for particle physics during the next few years will be the beginning of operation of the LHC, now planned for 2007. Besides that, here are various sources of information about what else will be … Continue reading →

The great French mathematician André Weil spent the months of February-May 1940 in a prison in Rouen, as a result of what he referred to as “a disagreement with the French authorities on the subject of my military obligations”. Others … Continue reading →

The FY 2006 budget requests to Congress are out today. In the parts relevant to funding for mathematics and physics, the information about the NSF request is here, and information about the DOE request is here. One should really be … Continue reading →

Michael Douglas gave a colloquium at City College this afternoon, with the title “Are there testable predictions of string theory?” I went up there to the talk, figuring that I knew more or less what he would say, but he … Continue reading →

Jacques Distler has a new posting about multi-loop string amplitudes. It’s mainly devoted to the Berkovits superstring formalism, and explains in some detail the possible problems with this formalism that one might worry about. I’d alluded to some of these … Continue reading →

Slashdot today has something pointing to Larry Osterman’s weblog where he tells the story of my ex-roommate David Weise’s career, much of which has been spent at Microsoft. David is generally credited with almost single-handedly making Windows a viable product, … Continue reading →