Upcoming events in and around New York, including several I’m planning to attend:<\/p>\n
The New York Academy of Sciences is having an evening of lectures this Wednesday, hosted by Frank Wilczek, on the topic of Expanding Frontiers of Physics and Cosmology<\/a>. Speakers will be Max Tegmark and Nima Arkani-Hamed.<\/p>\n The YITP at Stony Brook is having a symposium<\/a> to celebrate its 40th anniversary, and many former students, faculty and postdocs will be in attendance. I plan to definitely spend Thursday out there, maybe also Saturday.<\/p>\n One reason I likely won’t be out at Stony Brook on Friday is that I’d like to attend at least some talks at another event that will be downtown at the new location of the New York Academy of Sciences. It’s the 9th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting<\/a>, co-sponsored by Columbia’s ISCAP. Edward Witten will be among the four people speaking.<\/p>\n There will be an event entitled When the Scientist Becomes the Story<\/a> at NYU next week, on May 8th, featuring a discussion about John Nash and Francis Crick with their biographers. <\/p>\n Much farther in the future will be next year’s program on representation theory, algebraic geometry and physics<\/a> at the mathematics division of the IAS in Princeton. This will include a conference November 26-30 with a title reflecting my favorite topic “Gauge Theory and Representation Theory”. Presumably much of the focus will be on the Geometric Langlands program.<\/p>\n Closer in time, but farther in distance, I’ll be speaking at a science festival called FEST<\/a> in Trieste on May 18th. In June my book is supposed to be coming out in an Italian edition. I have to be in London the evening of May 23rd, then will head back to New York the next day. Currently trying to come up with a plan for how to spend the time in between, with the leading possibility a train trip through the Alps to Geneva, then a stop in Paris on the way to London.<\/p>\n In other news:<\/p>\n Lee Smolin has put up on his web-site a response<\/a> to the review<\/a> of his book and mine by Joe Polchinski.<\/p>\n On the Fields Medalist blogging front, there’s a report from Terry Tao<\/a> about a symposium at UCLA where he and three other Fields medalists gave talks. He gives a detailed description of the talks, including one by Richard Borcherds on QFT that sounds somewhat mystifying to me. Alain Connes at his blog gives his take<\/a> on some of the talks delivered at the recent conference in his honor.<\/p>\n I’ve recently for no particular reason run into various interesting domain-names that some mathematicians and physicists are using for one purpose or another: monodromy.com<\/a>, cohomology.com<\/a>, and stringvacua.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n A couple links mentioned by commenters here that deserve more visibility:<\/p>\n Neutrino Unbound<\/a> is a site devoted to all things neutrino.<\/p>\n An interesting document<\/a> concerning a bet made several years ago about whether supersymmetry will be found at currently (or soon-to-be) accessible energies is available here. Maybe someone can think of a way to get more particle theorists on the record about this…<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: For upcoming events really far afield from here, I should mention that the new Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Beijing is starting to get organized. Jonathan Shock reports<\/a> that there will be an opening ceremony at the end of May, a two month program on Quantum Phases of Matter starting in June, and a program on String Theory and Cosmology in the fall.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: I’ve just heard that Discover Magazine has chosen the finalists in its “String Theory in Two Minutes or Less” contest. No, I didn’t enter. Here<\/a> they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Upcoming events in and around New York, including several I’m planning to attend: The New York Academy of Sciences is having an evening of lectures this Wednesday, hosted by Frank Wilczek, on the topic of Expanding Frontiers of Physics and … Continue reading