Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Thursday someone pointed out to me that it was Alexander Grothendieck’s 85th birthday. Hopefully he is well and celebrating appropriately. Coincidentally I just heard the following rumor. Supposedly a couple months ago the librarian at the IHES got a … Continue reading →

It seems to be part of the job description of anyone in the sciences to periodically complain that scientific research funding is insufficient, with the situation going from bad to worse. For some recent examples, see this from Bruce Alberts, … Continue reading →

The long awaited CMB results from the Planck satellite are now out, see here. A NASA press conference is about to start here. You really should be reading about this somewhere else, from a much better informed blogger, someone expert … Continue reading →

As I predicted a few days ago, the string theorists in Princeton have made their choice for the $3 million dollar Fundamental Physics Prize: another Princeton string theorist, Alexander Polyakov. Evidently there’s no official announcement, so Matt Strassler has retracted … Continue reading →

Just woke up to see that this year’s Abel Prize has gone to algebraic geometer and number theorist Pierre Deligne, who is one of the truly great figures in 20th century mathematics. Deligne first became well-known for his proof of … Continue reading →

Conventional wisdom in the particle theory for about 30 years has been that the Standard Model has a huge “hierarchy” or “naturalness” problem, the solution to which is supposed to appear at the LHC via SUSY or some other new … Continue reading →

In more news about the Fundamental Physics Prize awards planned for tomorrow evening at CERN, it turns out that God himself (AKA Morgan Freeman) will be giving out the awards, as well as hosting a TV show about this the … Continue reading →

There should be lots of breaking news this upcoming week, sometimes with real-time webcasts for those that want to follow along: Planck data release on Thursday the 21st. Media briefing in Paris will be at 10am local time, see here. … Continue reading →

My main method for keeping track of new information on the web has for many years now been RSS, with Google Reader for a while the main tool for this. Google yesterday announced that they’re shutting this down, with as … Continue reading →

Fresh off its great long article about the Higgs, the New York Times is devoting a similar amount of space to the other big mind-blowing high energy physics story of the past year or two, Paul Frampton and his adventures … Continue reading →