Yearly Archives: 2005

David Gross Admits String Theory is in Trouble

The latest issue of New Scientist has an article entitled Nobel Laureate Admits String Theory is in Trouble. It describes remarks by David Gross at the recent Solvay conference in Brussels, mentioned here earlier. Gross described the current state of … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 41 Comments

The Cosmic Landscape

Susskind’s new book, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design is now out. It’s basically a lengthy version for the general public of the argument that he has been, with some success, trying to sell to … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews | 32 Comments

Roadmap for Fermilab

Over at Quantum Diaries, Rob Gardner has an interesting report on a lunchtime informal brown bag talk given yesterday by Pier Oddone, the director of Fermilab. He includes some telegraphic comments about prospects for financing future accelerators (the ILC and … Continue reading

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LatexRender

I’ve just added LatexRender support to this weblog, using Steve Mayer’s WordPress plugin. In principle you should now be able to add formulas in TeX in the comments by putting the TeX in between [tex ] and [/tex ] (without … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

Sciencegate

The editors at Seed magazine have started a new blog about science called sciencegate, which contains a wide variety of interesting material. One of the recent postings is called Strung Out on the Couch; it’s by Joshua Roebke and not … Continue reading

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Two Conferences

Two recent interesting conferences that have some materials available on-line: Last week the Perimeter Institute held a workshop on Emergence of Spacetime. Some of the talks are available at the Perimeter streaming video site (scroll to the bottom of the … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 28 Comments

Slate on Krauss

Slate today has an article entitled Theory of Anything? about Lawrence Krauss’s recent book and the controversy over string theory. The article begins by describing Krauss as having “a reputation for shooting down pseudoscience.” and goes on to say: Yet … Continue reading

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All Sorts of Links

Here’s a collection of things I’ve run across recently that may be of interest: The Tevatron is doing quite well, with sizable increases in luminosity in recent months. There are some articles telling about this in Fermilab Today, and you … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

A Particle Theorist’s Perspective on String Theory

There’s a new posting over at Cosmic Variance by JoAnne Hewett of SLAC about string theory, entitled A Particle Physicist’s Perspective. It gives a good idea of what I believe most non-string-theorist particle physicists think about string theory. She does … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 56 Comments

Jim Simons in the New York Times

There’s an article (unfortunately not available for free) in today’s New York Times based on an interview with the normally publicity-shy mathematician Jim Simons of Chern-Simons fame. Simons runs the incredibly successful hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and I’ve written something … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments