Various and assorted things that may be of interest:
Joshua Roebke at Seed has accumulated opinions about the landscape from various physicists. No real surprises; Witten wins the award for most non-committal:
I just don’t have anything incisive to say. I hope we will learn more.
There’s a mailing list called philphys devoted to “philosophical and foundational problems of modern physics.”
The web-site for the ICFA Seminar held in Korea a couple months ago has several interesting presentations on-line, including one by John Ellis, and several about future plans at various accelerator laboratories world-wide.
There was a conference recently in Geneva celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of E.C.G. Stueckelberg. Some anecdotes about Stueckelberg are here.
There is a bit of a controversy about another E.C.G., Sudarshan, who some (including himself) feel should have been part of this year’s Nobel prize in physics. Stories about this here, here, and here.
Some talks given at the recent conference at OSU on Strings and the Real World are on-line. See if you can find anything in them about the real world.
According to this article, string theory is now being marketed to the 6-11 year-old age group, appearing as test questions in the Flashcard Fishing game on the GoGo TV game system.
Barry Mazur has an article about category theory entitled When is one thing equal to some other thing?.
Penn State mathematician Adrian Ocneanu has designed a sculpture representing an interesting four dimensional figure, the Octacube.
Update: Sean Carroll has a new preprint out entitled Is Our Universe Natural?, and some commentary about it at Cosmic Variance. Unlike certain Nobel prize winners, Sean recognizes that before throwing in the trash the paradigm of how to do theoretical physics that has had such success for many centuries, one should at least have a shred of scientific evidence for one’s proposed alternative. He explains what the problems are with the one supposedly successful “prediction” of the anthropic principle, that of Weinberg for the cosmological constant, noting that it makes three assumptions, and :
The first of these is a guess, the second is likely to be fantastically wrong in the context of eternal inflation, and the last only makes sense if all of the other parameters are held fixed, which is not how we expect the multiverse to work.
Even with these dubious assumptions, the “prediction” one gets is off by more than an order of magnitude.
