Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Kostant Dirac Operator

Quantum mechanics and representation theory are very closely linked subjects since the Hilbert space of a quantum system with symmetry group G carries a unitary representation of G. To the extent that one has a way of quantizing a classical … Continue reading

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The Fundamental Lemma

For quite a few years now, when I ask my colleague Herve Jacquet about what is going on in his field, he tells me something like: “Maybe someone will soon be able to prove the Fundamental Lemma”. This is a … Continue reading

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The Good Old Days

Alvaro de Rujula has posted on the arXiv under the title “Fifty years of Yang-Mills Theories: a phenomenological point of view” some of his recollections from the mid-seventies. These bring back my own memories of taking a course on particle … Continue reading

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Rumors Available Again

The Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill has a new home. It’s no longer at the University of Washington, now it’s at the College of William and Mary Physics department. Now that it’s available again, the Rumor Mill has the … Continue reading

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HEPAP

HEPAP is the Department of Energy’s “High Energy Physics Advisory Panel”, which holds meetings 3-4 times a year. At these meetings, people from the DOE and NSF report on the latest news about US government funding for particle physcs, and … Continue reading

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Censorship

It seems that the second most important web-site in the particle theory community (the first is obviously the

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Are Fermion Masses Like Planetary Orbits?

A more and more common argument one hears from string theorists these days (for one version see a recent anonymous comment posted here) goes more or less like this: “A fundamental theory shouldn’t be expected to predict things like fermion … Continue reading

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Young String Theorist Did OK On His Final

A while back when looking for theoretical physics related weblogs I ran across The Search For A Theory of Myself: The Struggle Against String Theory which at first sounded right up my alley. It turns out to be the weblog … Continue reading

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String Theorists Finally Admit Defeat

The news that next week’s “Science Times” will run an article by NYT reporter James Glanz in which several leading string theorists say that they are giving up on the idea is rapidly spreading throughout the particle theory community. Evidently … Continue reading

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Various Hype

A recent new experimental result from Brookhaven has lead to some news stories like: Theory of matter in for a “sensational” revision which sounds pretty exciting. If you look into this more carefully, you’ll find that it’s based on a … Continue reading

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