Yearly Archives: 2006

Susskind Letter to NYT Book Review

This is about the sixth week in a row that the Sunday New York Times Book Review has had something about string theory or the Landscape controversy. It has become the main place in the popular press to follow this. … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Hawking Goes Anthropic

Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog have a new paper out, called Populating the Landscape: A Top Down Approach. It contains his version of the anthropic landscape idea, based on his “no-boundary” idea of quantum cosmology (sometimes also referred to as … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Swampiness on Long Island

At first I thought this must be an April Fool’s day joke, but I just checked the calendar, and it’s not April 1 yet. For the last few years Stony Brook has been running a workshop on math and physics … Continue reading

Posted in Swampland | 13 Comments

Lots More Landscape

Various things from the past couple days related to Susskind, the Landscape, and his book The Cosmic Landscape: The paper Computational Complexity of the Landscape I by Frederik Denef and Michael Douglas is out. They show that even in simplified … Continue reading

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A Survey of Elliptic Cohomology

There’s a beautiful survey paper about elliptic cohomology that Jacob Lurie, an AIM 5-year fellow in the math department at Harvard, has recently put on his home page. This paper has been discussed a bit already by David Corfield and … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

SLAC Physicists Develop Test For String Theory*

The SLAC web-site today has a feature article entitled SLAC Physicists Develop Test For String Theory*. The “*” refers to a footnote to the title saying “Under Certain Conditions”. This is about the 10500th news story making this kind of … Continue reading

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Down the Rabbit Hole

About a year and a half ago I wrote here about going to see the movie What the Bleep Do We Know?, a rather spectacularly stupid and lunatic film which extensively misuses quantum mechanics. This weekend, a sequel called What … Continue reading

Posted in Film Reviews | 41 Comments

European Strategy for Particle Physics

The CERN Council Strategy Group is putting together a document proposing a European stategy for particle physics, in a process to be completed this July. As part of this process, earlier this week the group held an Open Symposium at … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

Various Somewhat Related Links

David Goss wrote to tell me that Physics Web has an article about physics weblogs. The theorists quoted are Sean Carroll, Paul Cook and Dave Bacon. There’s an article by Michael Green in the latest Nature Physics reporting on the … Continue reading

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The Future of High Energy Accelerators

One of Fermilab’s recent colloquia was by James Rozensweig of UCLA on the topic of Reinventing the Accelerator for the High-Energy Frontier. Video and Powerpoint slides of the talk are now available. Current accelerator technologies are up against very fundamental … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments