Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was visiting the math department at Dartmouth the past couple days, and gave a colloquium talk there. It’s now available online.

Witten has contributed an essay to the latest issue of Nature about electroweak symmetry breaking. He describes the main conventional ideas about this, ending with the latest anthropic ones. Here are his comments about those: “One approach is the anthropic … Continue reading →

Sean Carroll has some comments about the anti-big bang petition. He also points to Ned Wright’s explanation of what is wrong with various proposed alternatives to the big bang scenario. In particular this explains in detail what the problems with … Continue reading →

Slides used by many of the lecturers at the recent Davis mathematical physics conference in honor of Albert Schwarz are now online.

It’s always a little worrying when this happens, but sometimes I find myself very much agreeing with at least parts of what Lubos Motl has to say. For example see this recent posting to sci.physics.strings. In it Motl argues that … Continue reading →

For many years now the SPIRES database at SLAC has been used to produce a list of the most frequently cited papers during each year. Since 1997 Michael Peskin has been doing this, while at the same time writing up … Continue reading →

The hundreds of expository articles about supersymmetry written over the last twenty years or more tend to begin by giving one of two arguments to motivate the idea of supersymmetry in particle physics. The first of these goes something like … Continue reading →

Slate this morning has an article by Jim Holt about an interview with Andrei Linde. In the interview, Linde speculates that universes like ours could be created in a lab, that maybe we live in such a universe, and that … Continue reading →

The last two talks at the Davis conference were quite interesting. Alexandre Givental gave one entitled “Twisted Loop Groups and Gromov-Witten Theory”, which went by way too fast. He has an interpretation of the generating functional for Gromov-Witten invariants that … Continue reading →

I’m in Nothern California this week, and have been attending some of the talks at the conference at UC Davis celebrating Albert Schwarz’s 70th birthday. The landscape at Davis is exceedingly flat, but this morning Lenny Susskind gave a remarkable … Continue reading →