Yearly Archives: 2009

Twistor Fever

It’s becoming clear what the hot new topic in particle theory is these days: the use of twistor space methods to try and understand scattering amplitudes in Yang-Mills and gravity theories, especially the maximally supersymmetric versions. This evening on the … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Particle Fever

LHC media fever continues this year, with at least three books out or on the way: The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider by Fermilab experimentalist Don Lincoln. Collider: The Search for the Worlds Smallest Particles by Paul Halpern. and … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Latest on the Higgs

The news media are full of stories about the observation at the Tevatron of “single top” production, at a rate consistent with that expected from the Standard Model. There are talks at Fermilab going on about this today, and the … Continue reading

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 11 Comments

Living With Infinities

Steven Weinberg has a new preprint out entitled Living with Infinities, which is the written version of a recent talk given in memory of Gunnar Källén. Källén was a Swedish mathematical physicist, who died in a plane accident in 1968 … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Worth Reading

Lots of wonderful blog postings about math and physics out there worth reading, with a small sample including these: Jester on SUSY and the Higgs. Dmitry Podolsky has some very useful guests posts on various topics, including chirality on the … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Yang-Mills and Wikipedia

I was recently looking up references about the history of Yang-Mills theory in order to write about it here, and one thing I ran into was the Wikipedia entry for Yang-Mills theory. It has three sections, the first two of … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

HEP Budget News

These are dramatic times for news about the US HEP budget, with the FY2009, FY 2010 budgets and stimulus package all coming together at the same time. The final stimulus package was very favorable for DOE and NSF, providing an … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

On History

When learning about various ideas in mathematics and physics, I’m always fascinated by the history of these ideas and eagerly read whatever I can find on the subject. Partly this is because my understanding of ideas is often enlightened by … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 42 Comments

Mission Accomplished

A few years ago the asset value of string theory in the market-place of ideas started to take a tumble due to the increasingly obvious failure of the idea of unifying physics with a 10/11 dimensional string/M-theory. Since then a … Continue reading

Posted in This Week's Hype | 82 Comments

Too Many Topics

Last Friday at the KITP there was a celebration of Stanley Mandelstam’s 80th birthday, with talks available here, and some messages from other physicists here. Geoffrey Chew recalls how Berkeley hired Mandelstam away from Columbia, where no one was very … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments