Category Archives: Uncategorized

My old friend and Princeton roommate Nathan Myhrvold has written an excellent piece about the anthropic principle and the Smolin-Susskind debate that has just been posted on the Edge web-site. It seems to me to summarize the issues very clearly. … Continue reading →

John Brockman at his “Edge” web-site has put up an exchange between Smolin and Susskind about the “multiverse” and the anthropic principle. This includes the page and a half paper by Susskind that was rejected by the arXiv. Susskind seems … Continue reading →

Jeff Harvey sent in a comment correcting me on a point of history in my last posting. I’d read somewhere about Green and Schwarz fed-exing their paper to Witten, and had assumed this was their idea. Harvey, who was at … Continue reading →

Today a symposium is being held in Aspen to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution”. The canonical story of this “Revolution” is that twenty years ago this month, on a dark and stormy night at a workshop … Continue reading →

A couple conferences going on this week have already put some of the talks online. SLAC has a summer school each year, aimed more at experimentalists than theorists. This year’s topic is “Nature’s Greatest Puzzles” and there are quite a … Continue reading →

Roger Penrose has a new book out in England, called “The Road to Reality”. It is 1000 pages long and is now ranked number 17 on Amazon’s UK site. There’s a review of the book here. It sounds like the … Continue reading →

Susskind has posted a new preprint entitled “Cosmic Natural Selection”. It’s just two pages of various attacks on Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological (not cosmic) natural selection. Smolin’s theory is described in detail in his book “The Life of the … Continue reading →

Now string theory is being used to peddle Verizon DSL service (courtesy of Lubos Motl). According to the writers of the advertising copy : “String Theory: The so-called unified theory is gaining credibility among young scientists” Right.

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor at the New Republic, and gives every indication of being a complete moron. His column about Hawking’s recent talk on black hole information loss is a masterpiece of anti-intellectualism. He appears to believe that … Continue reading →