Yearly Archives: 2005

Several months ago Erick Weinberg had told me that his recollections of the story of the calculation of the Yang-Mills beta function were different than David Politzer’s. Erick actually did independently do the beta function calculation (for the case with … Continue reading →

Over at the new Cosmic Variance blog, Sean Carroll has posted a defense of string theory against what he sees as disdain, resentment and disparaging remarks from other physicists, a defense he entitles Two Cheers for String Theory. I’ve written … Continue reading →

It has been almost exactly a year since Hawking gave a talk in Dublin claiming to have found a resolution of the black hole information paradox. Tonight a preprint giving some details of his argument has appeared. I’ll leave to … Continue reading →

Sean Carroll, of Preposterous Universe, has joined forces with Mark Trodden (of Orange Quark), and new bloggers SLAC particle phenomenologist JoAnne Hewett, USC string/brane theorist Clifford Johnson, and Chicago cosmologist Risa Wechsler. They’ll be collaborating on a new weblog entitled … Continue reading →

A colleague informs me that the latest New York Review of Books contains a letter from one of the most well-known mathematicians in the U.S.

Most of the talks at Strings 2005 about the landscape have now taken place, although there’s at least one more this afternoon by Dine. Frederik Denef gave a survey talk entitled Constructions and distributions of string vacua. One amusing thing … Continue reading →

The August issue of Discover magazine is out, with a cover story entitled “Is String Theory About to Snap?”. The editors of the magazine describe how they recently became aware of the controversy over string theory when they organized a … Continue reading →

I’d been wondering why Lubos Motl seemed rather subdued in recent months, now one of his recent postings makes some reasons for this clear. Evidently since April he’s been the victim of someone who has been sending him grotesque anonymous … Continue reading →