Monthly Archives: November 2004

An excellent review article about the state of the proof of the Poincare conjecture by my colleague John Morgan has recently appeared. For more background on this, see an earlier posting. Morgan is a topologist, and his article contains an … Continue reading →

The U.S. Congress has finally gotten around to producing a budget for fiscal year 2005. Some information about the budget numbers for scientific research is available here and here. The NSF budget for research and related activities is being cut … Continue reading →

For a depressing look at where theoretical physics is headed, see this new article from Time magazine. I agree with the analysis of it posted here.

In the comment section of the last post, Lubos Motl points to the story of Billy Cottrell, a young string theorist at Caltech accused of being involved in the vandalism of SUVs. Evidently he has now testified against others at … Continue reading →

The latest trend among prominent theorists seems to be the writing of popular books hyping the unsuccessful speculative ideas they have been working on. Two new examples of this have been pointed out by Lubos Motl over at sci.physics.strings. Both … Continue reading →

From Sean Carroll’s weblog I see that he’s in Austin now for a session at a meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Philosophers of science seem to actually write up their talks in advance, and many of the talks … Continue reading →

The KITP at Santa Barbara is holding a conference on QCD and String Theory this week, and the talks have started to appear online. Of the ones I’ve taken a quick look at so far, there doesn’t seem to be … Continue reading →

Martin Veltman gave a colloquium talk at Fermilab two weeks ago and, as usual, had some very provocative comments to make. At the end of his talk he made the claim that the only thing astrophysics has contributed to particle … Continue reading →

The Jacobian Conjecture is one of the most well-known open problems in algebraic geometry. It now seems that a proof has been found by Carolyn Dean of the University of Michigan, for the case of polynomials in two complex variables … Continue reading →

At his talk last year at the conference in honor of Gelfand’s 90th birthday, Atiyah posed the question of whether there is a quantum field theoretic explanation of why the coefficients of the Jones polynomial are integers. Witten’s Chern-Simons-Witten theory … Continue reading →