Category Archives: Uncategorized

The 2020 Physics Nobel Prize was announced this morning, with half going to Roger Penrose for his work on black holes, half to two astronomers (Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez) for their work mapping what is going on at the … Continue reading →

A few quick links: I was sorry to hear of the recent death of Vaughan Jones. A few things about his life and work have started to appear, see here, here and here. For a wonderful in-depth article about the … Continue reading →

The AMS for the last few years has had a valuable project called AMS Open Math Notes, a site to gather and make available course notes for math classes, documents of the sort that people sometimes make available on their … Continue reading →

The research that gets done in any field of science is heavily influenced by the priorities set by those who fund the research. For science in the US in general, and the field of theoretical physics in particular, recent years … Continue reading →

I’m a big fan of Sabine Hossenfelder’s music videos, the latest of which, Theories of Everything, has recently appeared. I also agree with much of the discussion of this at her latest blog posting where Steven Evans writes nobody wants … Continue reading →

The explanation for the lack of blogging here the past month is mostly that I haven’t seen any news worth blogging about. It took only a little bit of self-control to not do things like make snarky comments about recent … Continue reading →

Way back in the 1980s and 1990s I was, for obvious personal reasons, paying close attention to the job situation for young HEP theorists. They were not good at all: way more talented young theorists than jobs, many if not … Continue reading →

Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a few of the lectures available here. The … Continue reading →

There’s a new article at Quanta today promoting representation theory, Kevin Hartnett’s The ‘Useless’ Perspective that Transformed Mathematics. Representation theory is a central, unifying theme in modern mathematics, one that deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets, with … Continue reading →

I never thought I would see this happen: a university PR department correcting media hype about its research. You might have noticed this comment here a week ago, about a flurry of media hype about neutrinos and parallel universes. A … Continue reading →