Yearly Archives: 2005

Shamit Kachru (described by Lenny Susskind as the “master Rube Goldberg architect”) and collaborators have a new paper out this evening on flux compactifications, one that in a rational world should finish off the subject completely. Recall that Kachru is … Continue reading →

Someone wrote to me today to tell me that Harvard’s Nima Arkani-Hamed recently gave a lecture in Washington with the title “String Theory — Can We Test It?”. Somehow, I suspect that his lecture didn’t really give an honest answer … Continue reading →

This past weekend I was in Cambridge and attended many of the talks at the JDG conference held at Harvard. The conference was nominally in honor of Shiing-Shen Chern, who died late last year, so many speakers made some connection … Continue reading →

Quite a few people have written in to point out to me a recent paper by some condensed matter physicists about the possibility of trapping a fermionic atomic gas in a vortex inside a Bose-Einstein condensate. As far as I … Continue reading →

When I first started studying quantum mechanics I read quite a bit about the remarkable history of the subject, especially about the brief period from 1925-27 when the subject grew dramatically out of the incoherent ideas of the old quantum … Continue reading →

I’ve recently run across various interesting mathematically oriented sites, each with some connection to physics: Alain Connes now has a web-site. He’s now a professor at Vanderbilt University as well as at the College de France. I can see him … Continue reading →

Lubos Motl has taken to signing some of his postings with “leashed”, and Capitalist Imperialist Pig has speculated that “My dark suspicion is that he might have gotten caught in a PC violation in the Summers Affair, forcing him to … Continue reading →

For the last couple days students at Princeton have been protesting the Republican’s plan to invoke the “nuclear option” and stop Democrats from filibustering a small number of Bush’s judicial nominees. This protest has taken the form of organizing a … Continue reading →

According to a new article in New Scientist entitled The Theory of Everything: Are we nearly there yet? (unfortunately not available for free on-line), “The hunt for the theory of everything is turning into a road trip from hell – … Continue reading →