Yearly Archives: 2004

Jeff Harvey sent in a comment correcting me on a point of history in my last posting. I’d read somewhere about Green and Schwarz fed-exing their paper to Witten, and had assumed this was their idea. Harvey, who was at … Continue reading →

Today a symposium is being held in Aspen to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution”. The canonical story of this “Revolution” is that twenty years ago this month, on a dark and stormy night at a workshop … Continue reading →

A couple conferences going on this week have already put some of the talks online. SLAC has a summer school each year, aimed more at experimentalists than theorists. This year’s topic is “Nature’s Greatest Puzzles” and there are quite a … Continue reading →

Roger Penrose has a new book out in England, called “The Road to Reality”. It is 1000 pages long and is now ranked number 17 on Amazon’s UK site. There’s a review of the book here. It sounds like the … Continue reading →

Susskind has posted a new preprint entitled “Cosmic Natural Selection”. It’s just two pages of various attacks on Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological (not cosmic) natural selection. Smolin’s theory is described in detail in his book “The Life of the … Continue reading →

Now string theory is being used to peddle Verizon DSL service (courtesy of Lubos Motl). According to the writers of the advertising copy : “String Theory: The so-called unified theory is gaining credibility among young scientists” Right.

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor at the New Republic, and gives every indication of being a complete moron. His column about Hawking’s recent talk on black hole information loss is a masterpiece of anti-intellectualism. He appears to believe that … Continue reading →

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 →