Category Archives: Uncategorized

Lubos Motl has an interesting post on sci.physics.stringsthat gives a detailed explanation of the current state of string field theory. One way of motivating quantum field theory is to start with a “first-quantized” quantum theory of particles (perhaps defined by … Continue reading →

This month is the 50th anniversary of the formal founding of the CERN laboratory near Geneva. There’s a very interesting article in Physics World about CERN and its future plans. LHC construction seems to be proceeding more or less on … Continue reading →

The latest issue of the Notices of the AMS contains the first part of a long biographical article about Grothendieck written by Allyn Jackson. Evidently Winfried Scharlau is writing a biography of Grothendieck, and Jackson’s article is partially based on … Continue reading →

One of the great stories of mathematics in recent years has been the proof of the Poincare conjecture by Grisha Perelman. This has been one of the most famous open problems in mathematics and has been around for about one … Continue reading →

When I first started this weblog I thought very few people would be interested in reading it. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised both by the general high quality of the comments people contribute and by the ever increasing number of … Continue reading →

The Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society has been having its annual meeting at UC Riverside during th past few days, and some of the plenary talks have been put on-line. Particularly interesting is the talk … Continue reading →

A new preprint by Tom Banks is out, about his idea of “Cosmological Supersymmetry Breaking”. One notable aspect of the paper is a new terminology to describe Weinberg’s “prediction” about the cosmological constant. Since the term “anthropic principle” normally applied … Continue reading →

The latest issue of Scientific American is devoted to articles about Einstein and his legacy. One article in the magazine doesn’t really have much to do with Einstein and I believe would make him gag if he were still around. … Continue reading →

Larry Yaffe’s comments about string theory reflect well mainstream opinion in the particle physics community. On matters of fact I think what he has to say is pretty accurate, but I disagree with some of his statements that reflect not … Continue reading →

For many years now, the highest priority of experimental particle physicists for a next-generation accelerator project has been a new electron-positron linear accelerator. The last high energy electron-positron collider, LEP, reached a total energy of 209 Gev before being shutdown … Continue reading →