Monthly Archives: September 2008

Discussion of quantum gravity at a level similar to that of parts of the professional physics community makes it to prime-time TV: Update: I should have credited where I first saw reference to this (no, I don’t normally watch this … Continue reading →

Steve Hsu has a recent posting Survivor: theoretical physics, which links to data about the theoretical particle physics job market compiled by Erich Poppitz from listings on the Theoretical Particle Physics Rumor Mill web-site. Back in 2001-2 I also spent … Continue reading →

I’ve heard reports from Harvard that yesterday and today Heisuke Hironaka has been giving talks in the math department there, claiming to have a proof that singularities of algebraic varieties can be resolved for any dimension in characteristic p. This … Continue reading →

Besides the meltdown in the financial markets, perhaps of more concern to physicists is a meltdown at CERN, specifically in the connection between two magnets during powering tests being conducted at 11:17 last Friday the 19th. Here’s the daily report … Continue reading →

This posting will quickly veer far off the usual topics of this blog into political issues that I normally avoid like the plague. For once, the issues involved seem important enough to interrupt your regularly-scheduled programming. I hope to not … Continue reading →

There are two new particle theory blogs that I’ve noticed recently: Shores of the Dirac Sea, where David Berenstein and Moshe Rozali are blogging and the Physics Anti-Crackpot Blog, by an anonymous author at CERN. I don’t know who this … Continue reading →

Some wag at the Wall Street Journal put the headline Don’t Buy Into the Supercollider Hype on today’s Op-Ed piece by Michio Kaku about the LHC, which describes its significance as follows: The LHC might shed light on the “theory … Continue reading →

This week the Perimeter Institute is hosting an unusual conference on Science in the 21st Century. One of the organizers is Sabine Hossenfelder, who has a posting discussing the conference here, and may have some more about it at her … Continue reading →

There’s a media storm about the LHC building up as CERN makes last minute preparations to circulate a first beam in the machine. Cosmic Variance has live-blogging about this by a group of theorists, and Tommaso Dorigo will be in … Continue reading →

Roger Highfield has gone out and asked several theorists for LHC predictions, with the following results. About supersymmetry: Arkani-Hamed My hunch is that there’s a better than evens chance that supersymmetry will show up at the LHC… Veltman I would … Continue reading →