Monthly Archives: June 2004

Cosmic String Hype

According to a press release from UCSB, three theoretical physicists have proposed “the most viable test to date for determining whether string theory is on the right track”. This is based on a paper about cosmic strings where the authors … Continue reading

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Bogdanov Thesis Reports

From one of the comments here I see that the Bogdanovs have put the reports on their theses on the CERN document server. One should perhaps take these with a grain of salt given their source. For instance, I wouldn’t … Continue reading

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de Branges and the Riemann Hypothesis

Louis de Branges is a mathematician at Purdue who has had a long history of claiming proofs of the Riemann hypothesis. His latest claim has lead to a press release from Purdue. The press release points to what seems to … Continue reading

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Bogdanovs Redux

A couple years ago two French brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, managed to get Ph.Ds in France and publish several nonsensical papers about quantum gravity in refereed physics journals, several of them rather well-known and prestigious ones. John Baez has … Continue reading

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Dartmouth Talk

I was visiting the math department at Dartmouth the past couple days, and gave a colloquium talk there. It’s now available online.

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Witten on Electroweak Symmetry Breaking

Witten has contributed an essay to the latest issue of Nature about electroweak symmetry breaking. He describes the main conventional ideas about this, ending with the latest anthropic ones. Here are his comments about those: “One approach is the anthropic … Continue reading

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