Category Archives: Uncategorized

Robbert Dijkgraaf is about the most lucid expositor around on the topic of what now goes under the name “topological strings”. This week he’s been giving the Coxeter Lectures at the Fields Institute in Toronto, and the slides and audio … Continue reading →

Today’s Guardian has an article by a writer who recently visited the Institute in Princeton to talk to Witten and others there about string theory. The author of the piece makes the obvious analogy between Witten and Einstein, and asks … Continue reading →

Most new preprints in mathematics and physics these days are posted on the arXiv, but every so often I run into interesting new things worth reading that haven’t appeared there for one reason or another. Here are some recent examples: … Continue reading →

For some interesting comments by Nima Arkani-Hamed about his model-building activities, followed by some of my own, take a look here. Update: Jacques Distler has some comments on the Arkani-Hamed et. al. paper.

The world of particle physics web logging expanded by about an order of magnitude today, as a new web-site called Quantum Diaries came on-line. The idea seems to be to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s remarkable 1905 papers by … Continue reading →

As of yesterday, I’ve started deleting comments from this weblog if they seem to me to be completely off-topic or make no sense. By the end of last year, the comment section here had begun to turn into something I … Continue reading →

In recent years, as it has become clear that string theory can never be used to predict anything about the real world, string theorists have reacted to this state of affairs in various often bizarre ways. Tonight there’s a new … Continue reading →

A preprint by Andrei Marshakov and Antti Niemi appeared on hep-th this evening making a remarkable claim. According to this preprint, a few weeks before passing away recently at the age of 93, Shiing-Shen Chern completed a preprint entitled “On … Continue reading →

Greg Moore has written an article for the latest Notices of the AMS entitled “WHAT IS… a Brane?”. He begins by noting that “The term ‘brane’ has come to mean many things to many people” and one of the difficulties … Continue reading →

Several people wrote in this morning to tell me about Phil Anderson’s comments about string theory that appeared in the New York Times today. These originally come from John Brockman’s “Edge” web-site where he has gathered responses from more than … Continue reading →