A few unrelated items:<\/p>\n
You may not use the material for commercial purposes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Even if Google is massively violating the arXiv licenses for commercial purposes, it’s unclear whether anything can be done about this, especially given the legal resources Google can afford. In addition, I suspect that when hearing about this a more common response than “this is terrible, I want to sue” would be “this is great, how can I get this thing to write papers for me, or even better, get Google to pay me to help make this possible.”<\/li>\n
- Last month Symmetry magazine had an article Whatever happened to the theory of everything?<\/a> featuring some quotes from me and John Ellis. Ellis explains that the particle physics community has become skeptical of supersymmetry and string theory:
\nSupersymmetry seemed less and less likely to be right, and superstring theory never materialized into something with testable and concrete predictions.<\/p>\n
“The rest of the community is asking, ‘Where’s the beef?\u2019” Ellis says. \u201cThere hasn’t been any beef yet. Maybe particle physicists have turned a bit vegetarian and have lost interest in stringy beef.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n
- Possibly in response to the problem for string theory that Ellis is pointing to, Witten next week is giving a non-technical theoretical physics colloquium talk at the ICTP on What Every Physicist Should Know About String Theory<\/a>. Back in 2015 he published something with the same title in Physics Today<\/a>, which I wrote about here<\/a>. We’ll see if there are any new arguments on this now very old topic.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Update<\/strong>: The 2023 Shaw prize in mathematics is going to Drinfeld and Yau.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong>: I missed the fact that last there was a Breakthrough Prize ceremony last month. This year they’ve emphasized even more the “Oscars of science” idea by moving the ceremony from Silicon Valley to LA and having it at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The announcement<\/a> has none of the names of the scientists, just the names of the Hollywood stars that would attend.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong>: I see (from a Strumia tweet<\/a>) that a Witten 2015 talk with the same title is available here<\/a>, was given I guess as a public talk at Strings 2015. It’s all about the differences between the 1d single-particle path integral and the 1+1d worldsheet path integral, unclear to me why this is something every physicist needs to know about, or whether this year’s version will be different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few unrelated items: I’ve been hearing from several people about their plans to travel to China this summer, just realized that they’re all going there for the same reason, to participate in the First International Congress of Basic Science. … Continue reading