Monthly Archives: January 2005

Model Building

For some interesting comments by Nima Arkani-Hamed about his model-building activities, followed by some of my own, take a look here. Update: Jacques Distler has some comments on the Arkani-Hamed et. al. paper.

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Quantum Diaries

The world of particle physics web logging expanded by about an order of magnitude today, as a new web-site called Quantum Diaries came on-line. The idea seems to be to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s remarkable 1905 papers by … Continue reading

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New Policy

As of yesterday, I’ve started deleting comments from this weblog if they seem to me to be completely off-topic or make no sense. By the end of last year, the comment section here had begun to turn into something I … Continue reading

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The Problem of Predictivity

In recent years, as it has become clear that string theory can never be used to predict anything about the real world, string theorists have reacted to this state of affairs in various often bizarre ways. Tonight there’s a new … Continue reading

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Complex Structures on the Six-sphere

A preprint by Andrei Marshakov and Antti Niemi appeared on hep-th this evening making a remarkable claim. According to this preprint, a few weeks before passing away recently at the age of 93, Shiing-Shen Chern completed a preprint entitled “On … Continue reading

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What is a Brane?

Greg Moore has written an article for the latest Notices of the AMS entitled “WHAT IS… a Brane?”. He begins by noting that “The term ‘brane’ has come to mean many things to many people” and one of the difficulties … Continue reading

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Anderson and Others at the Edge

Several people wrote in this morning to tell me about Phil Anderson’s comments about string theory that appeared in the New York Times today. These originally come from John Brockman’s “Edge” web-site where he has gathered responses from more than … Continue reading

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More Science Fiction

It seems that every week there’s a new book out about branes, M-theory, the multiverse, etc. by someone who doesn’t really seem to understand the difference between science and science fiction. This week’s example is Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds: A … Continue reading

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