Yearly Archives: 2004

The KITP at Santa Barbara is holding a conference on QCD and String Theory this week, and the talks have started to appear online. Of the ones I’ve taken a quick look at so far, there doesn’t seem to be … Continue reading →

Martin Veltman gave a colloquium talk at Fermilab two weeks ago and, as usual, had some very provocative comments to make. At the end of his talk he made the claim that the only thing astrophysics has contributed to particle … Continue reading →

The Jacobian Conjecture is one of the most well-known open problems in algebraic geometry. It now seems that a proof has been found by Carolyn Dean of the University of Michigan, for the case of polynomials in two complex variables … Continue reading →

At his talk last year at the conference in honor of Gelfand’s 90th birthday, Atiyah posed the question of whether there is a quantum field theoretic explanation of why the coefficients of the Jones polynomial are integers. Witten’s Chern-Simons-Witten theory … Continue reading →

Shamit Kachru gave the physics colloquium at Rutgers yesterday. His title was “The Theory of More Than Everything” and I heard from people who attended that he was promoting research into the “Landscape” as a new model of how to … Continue reading →

A correspondent points out that this month’s Physics Today has a couple articles about ethical issues involved in how physics research is conducted in the U.S. Most of this doesn’t really apply to the kind of research I know best, … Continue reading →

Howard Georgi gave a colloquium at Fermilab last week, and the slides and video from his talk are now online. He has gathered quite a lot of interesting data about women in the various sciences at the undergraduate and graduate … Continue reading →

SLAC and Fermilab have joined forces and replaced their “FermiNews” and “Beam Line” publications with a new one called “Symmetry”. I like the title; it’s nice to see that the major US particle physics labs are supporting a publication about … Continue reading →

One of the arguments often given for string theory is that it is somehow exceptionally “beautiful”. This has always mystified me, since that’s certainly not the way I would describe it. Over the years I’ve paid close attention whenever I … Continue reading →