Monthly Archives: June 2005

The status of Perelman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture is still somewhat confusing. For some background see a previous posting and a later follow-up. Last week the ICTP in Trieste issued a press release entitled Poincare Conjecture Solved, which states … Continue reading →

There’s an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Quantum Diaries Webloggers. It points out that since this project is organized by the high energy physics labs, it “presents a sanitized version of life in high-energy physics”, with … Continue reading →

Via David Goss and Lubos Motl, the news that CNN’s Candy Crowley has a piece about Witten. Unlike Lee Smolin’s Why No “New Einstein”? piece, CNN more or less identifies Witten as the new Einstein. Witten is quoted as giving … Continue reading →

According to today’s New York Times, “string theory allows for a vast number – 10,500 – of possible ‘worlds’ wth different self-consistent sets of laws and constants.” If 10,500 is “vast”, I wonder what 10500 is? I also wonder how … Continue reading →

Here’s a collection of interesting things I’ve run across recently: A website devoted to Hermann Weyl. The author is a religious sort, but of the good kind. A movie taken at the 1927 Solvay conference. It is on the website … Continue reading →

If you didn’t follow this a couple years ago, you can read John Baez’s detailed description of the Bogdanoff Affair. For more about my dealings with them, see here,, here, and here. If you want to read their stuff, go … Continue reading →

These days some of the strongest criticisms of what is going on in string theory are coming from Lubos Motl’s weblog. His latest post asks what would have happened if currently fashionable ideas about string theory had appeared in the … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin wrote an interesting responses to comments in the comment section of my posting about his Physics Today piece entitled “Why No New Einstein?”. I’m reposting it here. “Dear Peter and colleagues, I am grateful for the attention given … Continue reading →

A couple months ago when I was shocked to realize how close to reality my April Fool’s parody had been, I’d unsuccessfully tried to find out some more information about the Templeton conference at Stanford that Mark Trodden had mentioned … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin has a piece in the latest Physics Today entitled Why no “new Einstein”?. Unfortunately it’s only available to Physics Today subscribers, although Lee tells me he will see if he can put it on-line on his web-page. Tony … Continue reading →