Monthly Archives: May 2005

The Pacific Institute for Theoretical Physics, based at UBC in Vancouver, held a Showcase Conference a couple weeks ago, which was supposed to “celebrate the exciting new developments taking place in theoretical physics”. According to the organizers there are lots … Continue reading →

Via Slashdot, an article that seems quite relevant to the current situation of string theory.

Earlier this week Jonathan Dorfan, the director of SLAC, announced a reorganization of the structure of the laboratory. The new structure involves four divisions, two scientific and two operational. One of the scientific divisions will bring together particle physics and … Continue reading →

Last Wednesday night, a paper appeared on the arXiv that spelled very bad news for the whole “Landscape” scenario of how to get physics out of string theory. This paper produced what appears to be an infinite number of possible … Continue reading →

The US High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) is meeting in Washington yesterday and today, and some of the presentations are already available on-line. These include one from the DOE Office of High Energy Physics which notes that, given budgetary … Continue reading →

Shamit Kachru (described by Lenny Susskind as the “master Rube Goldberg architect”) and collaborators have a new paper out this evening on flux compactifications, one that in a rational world should finish off the subject completely. Recall that Kachru is … Continue reading →

Someone wrote to me today to tell me that Harvard’s Nima Arkani-Hamed recently gave a lecture in Washington with the title “String Theory — Can We Test It?”. Somehow, I suspect that his lecture didn’t really give an honest answer … Continue reading →

This past weekend I was in Cambridge and attended many of the talks at the JDG conference held at Harvard. The conference was nominally in honor of Shiing-Shen Chern, who died late last year, so many speakers made some connection … Continue reading →

Quite a few people have written in to point out to me a recent paper by some condensed matter physicists about the possibility of trapping a fermionic atomic gas in a vortex inside a Bose-Einstein condensate. As far as I … Continue reading →