Not Even Wrong
Gross on Outlook for String Theory
David Gross just finished giving the closing talk at Strings 2008, on the outlook for string theory, following a talk by Hirosi Ooguri summarizing the conference. Strings 2009 will be in Rome next June, and it appears that there is a tentative plan to ha...
~ published: 08/22 at 12:22 ~ permalink
Freed on Chern-Simons
Dan Freed has a wonderful preprint out on the arXiv this evening, based on a talk he gave at the celebration of MSRI’s 25th anniversary, entitled Remarks on Chern-Simons Theory. It’s mainly about the current state of attempts to better unders...
~ published: 08/20 at 08:08 ~ permalink
Strings 2008
Strings 2008 starts tomorrow at CERN, with about 400 physicists in attendance. CERN will be providing a live webcast for the rest of us. The timetable of the talks is here. The first afternoon will be devoted not to string theory, but to the LHC.Those ...
~ published: 08/17 at 16:34 ~ permalink
The Landscape at CERN
The current plan at CERN is to celebrate my birthday by trying to circulate the first beam around the LHC on September 10 (actually my birthday is September 11, but in recent years my family, like CERN, has tended to celebrate on the 10th, feeling that 9/...
~ published: 08/14 at 18:22 ~ permalink
Grothendieck’s Later Years
Alexander Grothendieck’s 80th birthday was this past March, and the September Notices of the AMS has several articles about his later years. There’s a long piece entitled Who is Grothendieck?, by Winfried Scharlau, who is writing a three-volu...
~ published: 08/08 at 11:21 ~ permalink
Furby, Tamagachis, string theory…
Things don’t seem to be going well these days for string theory in the “marketplace of ideas”. From an article about gasoline-saving pedals:The 1990’s were the host of many great fads. Furby, Tamagachis, string theory, the examples a...
~ published: 08/08 at 10:46 ~ permalink
FQXI and Templeton News
The FQXI organization has just announced the details of $2.7 million dollars in grants that it will be handing out. The winners and their projects are described here. As usual, one of the main topics funded by FQXI is multiverse studies. There’s ...
~ published: 08/04 at 23:23 ~ permalink
ICHEP 2008
A major HEP conference, ICHEP 2008, is taking place in Philadelphia at the moment, and many of the talks are already available online here. This is mostly a conference devoted to experimental HEP, and the big news is the joint announcement by CDF and D0 ...
~ published: 08/04 at 22:56 ~ permalink
Blogging Heads Science Saturday
Today’s “Science Saturday” on Bloggingheads features me and Sabine Hossenfelder, supposedly talking about What’s wrong with string theory. Actually, we both agreed that we were pretty tired of that topic, so tried to discuss some ...
~ published: 07/26 at 10:21 ~ permalink
Gauge Theory and Langlands Duality
At the KITP in Santa Barbara there’s a wonderful program on Gauge Theory and Langlands Duality starting up this week, with some of the talks beginning to become available. The main topic will be the relations between S-duality in quantum field the...
~ published: 07/21 at 21:35 ~ permalink
The Emperor’s Last Clothes?
Bert Schellekens has posted on the arXiv an extended 87 page argument for the anthropic string theory landscape, entitled The Emperor’s Last Clothes? While most string theorists find the existence of the landscape and the corresponding inability to...
~ published: 07/21 at 21:01 ~ permalink
Awaiting a Messenger From the Multiverse
As particle physicists eagerly await results from the LHC, many theorists are already promoting interpretations of what they hope it will find. This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has a cover story on the LHC entitled The Machine at the End o...
~ published: 07/17 at 10:18 ~ permalink
Hawking to Perimeter?
The Canadian press today is putting out the story that Stephen Hawking may be abandoning Cambridge to move permanently to the Perimeter Institute, where he would join recently appointed director Neil Turok, as well as Lenny Susskind.From the stories it ap...
~ published: 07/16 at 08:01 ~ permalink
Surfing the Universe
This week’s New Yorker has a quite good article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells entitled “Surfing the Universe” about Garrett Lisi and the controversy generated last year by his paper An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (which I wrote...
~ published: 07/14 at 18:17 ~ permalink
This and That
Some quick links:The Clay Mathematics Institute is now making available for free online the books whose publication it has sponsored. These include the Morgan-Tian exposition of the proof of the Poincare conjecture. Surveys in Non-commutative geometry, ...
~ published: 07/08 at 14:46 ~ permalink
Back to the Future
Several things have come up recently that brought up the year 1985, the year the film “Back to the Future” came out.This summer the IAS will be running a two-week program at the IAS on Strings and Phenomenology, designed to train a new generat...
~ published: 07/07 at 15:05 ~ permalink
LHC Update
Latest press release from CERN about the LHC says first beams “currently scheduled for August”. According to a presentation at the July 2 meeting of the LHC Technical Committee, the latest news is that “circulating beam not before Septe...
~ published: 07/07 at 14:35 ~ permalink
Interview With Atle Selberg
Sticking with the theme of the Riemann Hypothesis, the AMS has recently posted some articles to appear in an upcoming issue of the AMS Bulletin, one of which contains a long interview with Atle Selberg, who died last summer at the age of 90. Selberg had ...
~ published: 07/04 at 14:52 ~ permalink
Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis?
Last night a preprint by Xian-Jin Li appeared on the arXiv, claiming a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. Preprints claiming such a proof have been pretty common, and always wrong. Most of them are obviously implausible, invoking a few pages of elementary...
~ published: 07/02 at 15:15 ~ permalink
Physics Nobel Laureates at Lindau
This week there’s a Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, devoted to physics. Many of the talks can be viewed on-line. From 3-5pm today (Lindau time) there will be a session devoted to a panel discussion of expectations for the LHC. Besides the Lind...
~ published: 07/01 at 05:47 ~ permalink
Wonders of Gauge Theory and Supergravity
A workshop in Paris/Saclay is taking place this week entitled Wonders of Gauge Theory and Supergravity and the talks are now online. They show that some exciting new things have been happening in the study of gauge theory and supergravity amplitudes, and...
~ published: 06/27 at 12:44 ~ permalink
Supplemental US Science Funding
The Senate last night agreed to the House version of a bill that adds some supplemental science funding for FY2008, as part of a large “emergency” bill used to fund the the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The DOE Office of Science and NSF will eac...
~ published: 06/27 at 10:21 ~ permalink
The Black Hole War
Leonard Susskind has a new book that’s now out in the bookstores, entitled The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. It’s about the black hole information paradox, structured around his s...
~ published: 06/23 at 16:17 ~ permalink
Philosophy of Science on Bloggingheads.tv
Today’s Bloggingheads.tv diavlog features Sean Carroll and philosopher of science David Albert, discussing a variety of issues. Albert tells about his unfortunate experience with the What the Bleep? film, a good example of why it’s not always...
~ published: 06/21 at 12:15 ~ permalink
Is the Universe Actually Made of Math?
The relationship between mathematics and physics is a topic that has always fascinated me, and today I noticed two interesting blog postings related to the topic. The first was Ben Webster’s posting inspired by a recent XKCD comic. The discussion ...
~ published: 06/17 at 22:12 ~ permalink
Atiyah on Atiyah-Bott
This week I’m in Montreal attending a conference in honor of Raoul Bott (who I wrote about in some detail here a couple years ago). On the first day of the conference, a documentary film about Bott made by his grandaughter Vanessa Scott was shown,...
~ published: 06/11 at 17:01 ~ permalink
Hints of ‘time before Big Bang’
The BBC is running a story entitled Hints of ‘time before Big Bang’ based on Sean Carroll’s latest efforts to promote the multiverse. The writer attended Sean’s talk at the recent AAS meeting and presumably also read Sean’s ...
~ published: 06/08 at 19:51 ~ permalink
Two Unrelated Topics
I was planning on writing something about the field with one element, but Lieven Le Bruyn has done a better job of it than I would have, linking to all of the recent news on this subject I was aware of, and more.Today’s New York Times has an article...
~ published: 06/03 at 08:50 ~ permalink
Experimental Predictions From F-Theory
I’ve been known to claim that string theory makes no experimental predictions, so this evening thought I better take a look at a preprint that just appeared entitled GUTs and Exceptional Branes in F-theory - II: Experimental Predictions. The abst...
~ published: 06/02 at 19:53 ~ permalink
World Science Festival
Most of the time the attention paid here to efforts to popularize physics is restricted to grumpy complaints about the hype surrounding string theory as well as the more general dubious phenomenon of scientists promoting things that are more science ficti...
~ published: 05/30 at 12:42 ~ permalink
P5 Report
A new P5 report is out, and being discussed at the HEPAP meeting in Washington today. The charge to P5 was to develop tentative 10 year plans for US HEP, under 3 scenarios:Scenario A: funding at the current post-budget cut level of $688 million for the D...
~ published: 05/29 at 15:27 ~ permalink
INSPIRE
Since 1968 SLAC has been maintaining a database of HEP documents called SPIRES, and this has become one of the main tools used by anybody searching the HEP literature. In recent years CERN has developed a much more modern document management system know...
~ published: 05/28 at 10:00 ~ permalink
Train of Thought
For the last 15 years the New York City subway has featured “Poetry in Motion”, which places extracts of poetry in subway cars. Starting next month this program will be expanded, joined by Train of Thought, which will add “short quotati...
~ published: 05/23 at 09:54 ~ permalink
News From CERN and Fermilab
Things have been going quite well recently at the LHC, with cooldown beginning now for the last two sectors of the ring, three sectors cool, and three cooling. The latest cooldown schedule is here, a report yesterday on progress here. Sometime in July t...
~ published: 05/23 at 09:21 ~ permalink
Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?
Scientific American in recent years seems to be quite fond of parallel universes, with major articles promoting the multiverse here, here and here (commentary on this blog here and here). Their latest issue continues in this vein with an article by Sean ...
~ published: 05/22 at 09:43 ~ permalink
Bryce DeWitt on Quantum Gravity and String Theory
Last night a preprint appeared on the arXiv from beyond the grave, an undated manuscript entitled Quantum Gravity, Yesterday and Today, found without any indication of its purpose in the files of Bryce DeWitt, who passed away in 2004.DeWitt devoted much ...
~ published: 05/21 at 09:29 ~ permalink
Quick Links
The speakers for Strings 2008 have been announced. One anomaly is that someone from the LQG camp has finally been invited, Carlo Rovelli. Another anomaly is that Witten won’t be speaking.Remember last November’s “unmistakable imprint o...
~ published: 05/15 at 09:33 ~ permalink
Do We Need to Change the Definition of Science?
Media hype about how the LHC is going to test string theory continues: see Will String Theory Be Proven and here:String theory has come under attack because some say it can never be tested; the strings are supposed to be smaller than any particle ever det...
~ published: 05/15 at 09:13 ~ permalink
Witten on Dark Energy
Commenter Shantanu pointed to a web-site with talks available on-line from a symposium about Dark Energy now going on at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Yesterday Witten gave a talk entitled “Models of Dark Energy”, where he lays out v...
~ published: 05/06 at 12:45 ~ permalink
“So what will you do if string theory is wrong?”
In a new preprint of an article entitled “So what will you do if string theory is wrong?”, to appear in the American Journal of Physics, string theorist Moataz Emam gives a striking answer to the question of the title. He envisions a future i...
~ published: 05/05 at 21:03 ~ permalink
Anonymity at Cosmic Variance
Over at Cosmic Variance, anonymous comments personally attacking me have been posted recently by someone who identifies themselves only as “string theorist”. I’ve complained to Sean Carroll and his colleagues about their policy of allow...
~ published: 05/01 at 22:45 ~ permalink
Creutz On Rooting
Michael Creutz has a remarkable new preprint out this evening, entitled The Saga of Rooted Staggered Quarks. It explains what has been going on in a rather bitter controversy within the lattice gauge theory community over the last few years.While lattic...
~ published: 04/28 at 21:14 ~ permalink
This and That
The interactions.org web-site has a new useful feature, Interactions Blog Watch, which aggregates links to recent physics-related blog entries. One of the older such aggregators I know of is Mixed States, but it seems to have stopped on March 15. Ther...
~ published: 04/27 at 13:05 ~ permalink
Experimentalists 1, Theorists 0
At Fermilab the Tevatron is producing record amounts of luminosity, see here for a story about a celebration of this. Things also appear to be going well at the LHC, as the cooldown remains on schedule, and only a tolerable number (12) of PIMs needed to ...
~ published: 04/18 at 13:32 ~ permalink
Multimedia and the Journal of Number Theory
I recently heard from David Goss, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Number Theory, that the journal is planning on introducing video abstracts for papers that they publish. Here’s his e-mail explaining this:Dear Colleagues:By now I believe that all...
~ published: 04/16 at 18:09 ~ permalink
John Wheeler 1911-2008
News of the death of John Wheeler came yesterday, and many people have already written detailed, touching and informative pieces about the man, his life and scientific achievements. See for example here, here, and here. With Wheeler gone, physics loses...
~ published: 04/14 at 13:21 ~ permalink
Dark Matter
Yesterday evening I went to see the new film Dark Matter, which opened here in New York this weekend. In many ways, it’s very good, much better than I was expecting.The plot is loosely based upon the story behind the 1991 shootings at the Universit...
~ published: 04/13 at 14:10 ~ permalink
Physicists On Tape
Over at the Center for Science Writings, John Horgan has started an interesting project of posting copies of taped interviews with scientists that he has accumulated over the years, starting with an interview with Chandrashekar. In a blog entry about th...
~ published: 04/12 at 12:27 ~ permalink
The New Math
Via Steve Hsu, I ran across the cover article from Alpha magazine, a magazine for the hedge fund industry, entitled The New Math. It describes the role physicists are playing in several hedge funds, developing sophisticated trading strategies. One of th...
~ published: 04/07 at 15:29 ~ permalink
Stony Brook Dialogues in Mathematics and Physics
Last week I spent a day out at Stony Brook, attending the second day of a two-day symposium devoted to mathematics and physics, held in honor of C. N. Yang and Jim Simons. Peter Steinberg was there for the first day, and has a report about this on his bl...
~ published: 04/05 at 13:38 ~ permalink