Category Archives: Uncategorized

When I was young, I recall that a standard assignment when restarting school was an essay on “what I did on my summer vacation”. Now that I’m back in the office after a vacation, here’s a version of that, covering … Continue reading →

Heading out soon for summer vacation travels, this time to Ireland and France, back in about two weeks. While away comments will be shut off. My vacation will spare readers commentary on the rest of the Strings 2015 talks, which … Continue reading →

Some of the talks at Strings 2015 have now appeared online, and one of them I found quite fascinating, Witten’s Anomalies Revisited. Some of his motivation comes from string perturbation theory and M-theory, but the questions he addresses are fundamental, … Continue reading →

Another conference that starts today is the Convergence conference at the Perimeter Institute. The concept is explained by Neil Turok here. His point of view is one I’m very much in sympathy with: Turok explains that the “large bandwagon” of … Continue reading →

Ordered from the more to less serious… On the geometric Langlands front, there’s video posted today of this talk by Dennis Gaitsgory. Michael Harris has already commented here about the local geometric Langlands conjecture in terms of 2-categories that Gaitsgory … Continue reading →

Every so often I’ve taken a look at something about theoretical physics on Reddit, generally ending up not spending much time there. One reason was that I realize I’m already spending more of my life than is healthy arguing with … Continue reading →

Since the news of the tragic death recently of John Nash and his wife in an automobile accident last weekend, some of those who were at Princeton during the same time I was (late 70s, early 80s) have been exchanging … Continue reading →

First test collisions at 6.5 TeV/beam at the LHC are tentatively scheduled for Thursday morning. At CERN today there’s a workshop about the Higgs Machine Learning Challenge. Also on the topic of LHC data analysis news, Tommaso Dorigo announces the … Continue reading →

Apologies for too much recent posting here about the tired topic of the string wars. I hope to soon make amends by writing about something new I learned about geometric Langlands. The summer 2015 issue of Perspectives in Science has … Continue reading →

The science magazine Nautilus this month has a profile of me, under the title The Admiral of the String Theory Wars. The writer, Bob Henderson, spent a lot of time talking to me and other people around here, including attending … Continue reading →