Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

I haven’t posted anything new here in a while, with the holidays and trying to get over a bad cold keeping me otherwise occupied. Partly because of this the comments section has been to some degree taken over by people … Continue reading →

Now for some comic relief: A new issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. It contains an entertaining article entitled Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor with many examples of mathematical humor. Physicists also put in an … Continue reading →

There’s an interview with Andy Strominger in the Calcutta newspaper The Telegraph. Strominger was presumably in India for the string theory conference there this past week. The thing I found interesting about the interview was how skeptical the interviewer was, … Continue reading →

I was wondering why there were lots and lots of hits on this weblog today coming from Google searches for “first evidence for string theory”. It looks like the answer is this lead article from the latest New Scientist magazine. … Continue reading →

Tom Banks has a new preprint out, entitled Landskepticism: or Why Effective Potentials Don’t Count String Models. In it he argues against the idea that one can use effective potentials to study the supposed “Landscape” of different vacuum states of … Continue reading →

The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics gave their Nobel lectures in Stockholm on Wednesday. The lectures of David Gross and Frank Wilczek are available on-line, for some reason that of David Politzer isn’t, at least not yet. … Continue reading →

This morning’s New York Times has a long and prominently placed article about the 20th anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution”. The Times has a long history of producing overhyped uncritical articles about string theory, for a classic example, see … Continue reading →