Category Archives: Uncategorized

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

Normally I avoid writing about the topic headlined here, not because it’s not of interest or not important, but because the usual discussions it attracts seem to me ideologically-driven, containing far more heat than light. The New York Times Magazine … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 46 Comments

Why mH= 126 GeV?

This week in Madrid there’s a conference going on with the title Why mH= 126 GeV?. It brings together HEP theorists working on “Beyond Standard Model” physics, with the majority of the participants from Western Europe, especially Spain. As part … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 41 Comments

Quick Links

The new issue of Nautilus has a wonderful story about Yitang Zhang, called The Twin Prime Hero, which includes a long interview with him. Zhang’s remarkable mathematical career includes several years working at a Subway in Kentucky. His sucessful work … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics

Today’s Slashdot tells us that Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics, a story that is based on an excellent article, A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics, by Natalie Wolchover at the new Quanta Magazine sponsored by the Simons … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments

Susskind: String theory not a complete picture of how quantum gravity works

For the latest on quantum gravity, readers might want to look at talks from some events of the last couple weeks. At the new ICTP-SAIFR theoretical physics institute in Sao Paulo, a school on quantum gravity has talks available here, … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Trust the math?

The last few days have seen some new revelations about the NSA’s role in compromising NIST standard elliptic curve cryptography algorithms. Evidently this is an old story, going back to 2007, for details see Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Perimeter Institute and the crisis in modern physics

Maclean’s has been publishing a very nice series of articles about Perimeter Institute by Paul Wells. These include one about Jacob Barnett, a 15 year-old who is now studying in a master’s level graduate program (Perimeter Scholars International) there. Another … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 50 Comments

SUSY 2013

The big yearly SUSY conference, SUSY 2013 has been going on in Trieste this past week. From the experimentalists, the news is just stronger limits: no hint of SUSY anywhere in the LHC data. From the theorists, the reaction to … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Two Cultures

There are two workshops going on this week that you can follow on video, getting a good idea of the latest discussions going on at two different ends of the spectrum of particle theory in the US today. At the … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 70 Comments

Quick Links

At HEP blogs you should be reading already, there’s Tommaso Dorigo on 5 sigma (with more promised to come), and Jester on the lack of a definite BSM energy scale. Jester puts his finger on the big problem facing HEP … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments