Category Archives: Uncategorized

Jacques Distler has something interesting about the prospects for producing black holes at the LHC. This has often been promoted as one of the most exciting possibilities for new physics from the LHC. Evidently it turns out that cosmic-ray experiments … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin has a new preprint discussing the “anthropic principle”. He argues that one standard form of the anthropic principle that has been invoked by proponents of the “Landscape” is not falsifiable and he gives an eloquent explanation of the … Continue reading →

Alexander Polyakov is one of the most prominent figures in theoretical physics and one of the most well-known string theorists at Princeton. He has written a review of his career and of his efforts to understand the relation between gauge … Continue reading →

Hawking gave his widely anticpated talk in Dublin today and reports are on CNN and all sorts of other places in the media. Sean Carroll has managed to get ahold (via Dennis Overbye of the New York Times) of a … Continue reading →

My copy of the proceedings of the conference in honor of Graeme Segal’s 60th birthday finally arrived and I’ve been spending some enjoyable time reading parts of it. To me, the most interesting contributions were the ones by Ben-Zvi and … Continue reading →

Two new books from Cambridge that are now available: A First Course in String Theory by Barton Zwiebach, based on a course on string theory for undergraduates taught at MIT. It’s available for \$42 at Barnes and Noble, sales rank … Continue reading →

Witten is lecturing at a conference in Crete this week and some of his transparencies are already online. He is talking about perturbative gauge theory amplitudes and the idea of interpreting them in terms of strings in twistor space. He … Continue reading →

There a new article on Slate about string theory and my colleague Brian Greene. Also some commentary about it on David Appell’s weblog Quark Soup.

Michael Atiyah and Graeme Segal have a new foundational paper out on twisted K-theory. It doesn’t have too many examples or applications, but lays a rigorous foundation for a certain point of view on the subject. Section 5 is the … Continue reading →

Throughout the mid-to-late 80s, the NSF and other organizations would periodically issue alarmist reports about an impending dangerous shortage of scientists and engineers in the U.S. These projections for shortages turned out to be utter nonsense, as anyone who looked … Continue reading →