Monthly Archives: August 2004

The Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society has been having its annual meeting at UC Riverside during th past few days, and some of the plenary talks have been put on-line. Particularly interesting is the talk … Continue reading →

A new preprint by Tom Banks is out, about his idea of “Cosmological Supersymmetry Breaking”. One notable aspect of the paper is a new terminology to describe Weinberg’s “prediction” about the cosmological constant. Since the term “anthropic principle” normally applied … Continue reading →

The latest issue of Scientific American is devoted to articles about Einstein and his legacy. One article in the magazine doesn’t really have much to do with Einstein and I believe would make him gag if he were still around. … Continue reading →

Larry Yaffe’s comments about string theory reflect well mainstream opinion in the particle physics community. On matters of fact I think what he has to say is pretty accurate, but I disagree with some of his statements that reflect not … Continue reading →

For many years now, the highest priority of experimental particle physicists for a next-generation accelerator project has been a new electron-positron linear accelerator. The last high energy electron-positron collider, LEP, reached a total energy of 209 Gev before being shutdown … Continue reading →

My old friend and Princeton roommate Nathan Myhrvold has written an excellent piece about the anthropic principle and the Smolin-Susskind debate that has just been posted on the Edge web-site. It seems to me to summarize the issues very clearly. … Continue reading →

John Brockman at his “Edge” web-site has put up an exchange between Smolin and Susskind about the “multiverse” and the anthropic principle. This includes the page and a half paper by Susskind that was rejected by the arXiv. Susskind seems … Continue reading →

Jeff Harvey sent in a comment correcting me on a point of history in my last posting. I’d read somewhere about Green and Schwarz fed-exing their paper to Witten, and had assumed this was their idea. Harvey, who was at … Continue reading →

Today a symposium is being held in Aspen to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution”. The canonical story of this “Revolution” is that twenty years ago this month, on a dark and stormy night at a workshop … Continue reading →