Monthly Archives: January 2005

Ken Lane has written a letter to the editor of the Boston University student newspaper to complain about its article about string theory and the BU physics department discussed in a previous posting. Lane is annoyed about not having been … Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, three string theorists, (Nicolai, Peeters and Zamaklar) posted on the arXiv a critical assessment of loop quantum gravity. Today I received from Lee Smolin something he wrote responding to them, and I’m posting it here with … Continue reading →

Eric D’Hoker and D.H. Phong this past week finally posted two crucial papers with results from their work on two-loop superstring amplitudes. The first one shows gauge slice independence of the two-loop N-point function, the second shows that, for N … Continue reading →

If you’ve been following the story of the “Landscape” over the past year or so you’d remember that its proponents felt that if it could predict anything it should be able to predict whether or not there will be supersymmetry … Continue reading →

The transparencies from the conference on twistor string theory held two weeks ago at Oxford are now available on-line. Quite a few of the talks deal with the technical details of computing amplitudes. For the motivation from phenomenological particle theory, … Continue reading →

There’s a quite interesting article on the controversy over string theory that appeared yesterday in the Boston University student newspaper. It gives some insight into the political battle now going on in many physics departments. The Boston University physics department … Continue reading →

There’s a new TV show called “NUMB3RS” starting tonight, whose main character is a mathematican named “Charlie”, who solves crimes using mathematics. His motto is “Everything is Numbers”. A secondary character is “Larry”, a Caltech physicist working on 11d supergravity. … Continue reading →

Robbert Dijkgraaf is about the most lucid expositor around on the topic of what now goes under the name “topological strings”. This week he’s been giving the Coxeter Lectures at the Fields Institute in Toronto, and the slides and audio … Continue reading →

Today’s Guardian has an article by a writer who recently visited the Institute in Princeton to talk to Witten and others there about string theory. The author of the piece makes the obvious analogy between Witten and Einstein, and asks … Continue reading →

Most new preprints in mathematics and physics these days are posted on the arXiv, but every so often I run into interesting new things worth reading that haven’t appeared there for one reason or another. Here are some recent examples: … Continue reading →