Category Archives: Uncategorized

Steven Weinberg has a new article in The New York Review of Books on The Crisis of Big Science, which is based on a talk he gave this past January at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin (for some … Continue reading →

One thing that a career in math or physics research can get you, courtesy of financial industry wealth, is a nice trip to the Virgin Islands. A couple current possibilities are: The Simons Foundation funds week-long Simons Symposia, at Caneel … Continue reading →

Yesterday’s New York Times had an article by Carl Zimmer about increasing numbers of retracted papers in the biological sciences. Physics and Mathematics weren’t part of the story and I don’t know of any evidence of retractions increasing in these … Continue reading →

Scientific American is doing a good job this month of putting out stories related to quantum gravity that actually make sense, steering clear of the multiverse and other pseudo-science. This month’s magazine has a very nice article by Steven Carlip … Continue reading →

Adrian Cho at Science magazine this week has an article about Craig Hogan’s project to build a “holometer” and somehow test the “holographic principle”. Since this promises some sort of experimental test of fashionable ideas about quantum gravity, it has … Continue reading →

I just noticed that the Templeton Foundation has a competition for $5 million in grants in the area of “strong emergence”, submission deadline very soon (April 16). I’m not sure I understand their distinction between “weak emergence” and “strong emergence” … Continue reading →

In this week’s Nature, Abraham Loeb, the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, has a column proposing the creation of a web-site that would act as a sort of “ratings agency”, implementing some mathematical model that would measure the health … Continue reading →

A report from India: ‘CERN need not spend so much on LHC experiment’ Father of String Theory and noted physics scientist Holger Bech Neilsen of Denmark has said that contributions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are over-rated … Continue reading →

This week at Caltech there’s a workshop celebrating the 35th anniversary of N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory. George Musser of Scientific American is covering the workshop here. He reports that N=4 Super Yang-Mills is being describe as the “Darth Vader theory”, … Continue reading →