{"id":2731,"date":"2010-02-11T14:03:03","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T19:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2731"},"modified":"2010-02-12T09:13:09","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T14:13:09","slug":"string-theory-for-undergraduates-at-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2731","title":{"rendered":"String Theory for Undergraduates at Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago various US universities decided it was a good idea to offer a course on string theory for undergraduates (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=427\">here<\/a>), but in recent years most of these seem to have been dropped from the curriculum.  Brown University is going in the other direction, offering Physics 1970C, String Theory for Undergraduates, this semester.   A report from a Brown undergraduate on Lubos&#8217;s blog gives me some encouragement to continue blogging:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Life is carrying on naturally. In fact, if I hadn&#8217;t been reading eg woit&#8217;s blog, I would&#8217;ve suspected we&#8217;re still in the middle of a stringy revolution! We even just started a new string theory course for undergrads, and I and quite a few other undergrads held a string theory seminar. Interest in stuff like LQG is completely zero. So in the press you have woit, smolin blahblahblahing, ok. But in the meantime, you have ads\/cft, and the whole twistor reformulation of yang mills in terms of contour integrals over grassmannians (inspired by twistor string theory). Even condensed matter physicists accept string theory as one of the greatest things that happened to physics. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The undergraduates at Brown have a String Theory Study Group, Facebook group <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/group.php?v=wall&#038;gid=65853556495\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  The undergraduate string theory courses are now facing some competition.  LSU is offering an undergraduate <a href=\"http:\/\/www.phys.lsu.edu\/classes\/spring2010\/phys4750\/\">Introduction to Loop Quantum Gravity<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago various US universities decided it was a good idea to offer a course on string theory for undergraduates (see here), but in recent years most of these seem to have been dropped from the curriculum. Brown &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2731\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2731"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2738,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2731\/revisions\/2738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}