Yearly Archives: 2004

A recent issue of Science magazine has an article about the “Strings and the Real World” workshop at Aspen this past summer, entitled String Theory Gets Real — Sort Of. A more accurate title for the article might be “String … Continue reading →

The second talk I heard yesterday at the Institute was by Chris Woodward from Rutgers. What he was talking about was a conjectural formula whose origins go back to a truly amazing paper by Witten from 1992 entitled Two Dimensional … Continue reading →

I was down in Princeton at the Institute yesterday and heard two interesting talks. The first was the beginning of a series of four lectures by Paul Baum about the Baum-Connes conjecture, the second was by Chris Woodward about “equivariant … Continue reading →

An excellent review article about the state of the proof of the Poincare conjecture by my colleague John Morgan has recently appeared. For more background on this, see an earlier posting. Morgan is a topologist, and his article contains an … Continue reading →

The U.S. Congress has finally gotten around to producing a budget for fiscal year 2005. Some information about the budget numbers for scientific research is available here and here. The NSF budget for research and related activities is being cut … Continue reading →

For a depressing look at where theoretical physics is headed, see this new article from Time magazine. I agree with the analysis of it posted here.

In the comment section of the last post, Lubos Motl points to the story of Billy Cottrell, a young string theorist at Caltech accused of being involved in the vandalism of SUVs. Evidently he has now testified against others at … Continue reading →

The latest trend among prominent theorists seems to be the writing of popular books hyping the unsuccessful speculative ideas they have been working on. Two new examples of this have been pointed out by Lubos Motl over at sci.physics.strings. Both … Continue reading →

From Sean Carroll’s weblog I see that he’s in Austin now for a session at a meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Philosophers of science seem to actually write up their talks in advance, and many of the talks … Continue reading →