Monthly Archives: September 2005

Some assorted things I’ve run across recently that may be of interest: Talks from the annual meeting of the SLAC Users Organization. A dialogue between Barry Mazur and Peter Pesic about imagination and mathematics. An Op-Ed piece in today’s New … Continue reading →

Zvi Bern gave a talk yesterday at the KITP in Santa Barbara entitled The S-Matrix Reloaded: Twistors, Unitarity, Gauge Theories and Gravity. He surveyed recent progress on computing perturbative amplitudes in QCD and N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills, some of which involves … Continue reading →

The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) takes place every four years and is the most important international conference in mathematics. The 2006 ICM will take place next August in Madrid. One thing that happens at each ICM is the announcement … Continue reading →

Philip Anderson has a piece in the latest Nature entitled Thinking Big. It’s about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and in it he claims that Fritz London was the first one to really have the right idea about the problem. … Continue reading →

The science magazine Seed is being relaunched, and the first issue of its new incarnation is now on the newsstands. Their motto is “Science is Culture”, and Clifford Johnson over at Cosmic Variance has an enthusiastic appreciation of what they … Continue reading →

Via For God, for Country and for Your Name Here, it seems that Alan Guth had the winning entry in a Boston contest for the messiest office. He won an office make-over, check out the before and after photographs.

There’s an interesting article by Graham Farmelo in last week’s Nature, entitled Dirac’s Hidden Geometry. Most people think of Dirac as a brilliant algebraist, but he himself claimed that his motivations and way of thinking were much more geometrical than … Continue reading →

After my initial success last year, I’ve retired from the business of predicting who will get Nobel prizes. This year’s physics prize will be announced in less than two weeks, on Tuesday, October 4. Anyone else want to make a … Continue reading →

A correspondent points out to me that the latest issue of American Scientist has a wonderful review of Roger Penrose’s new book The Road to Reality by computer scientist, author, artist, etc. Jaron Lanier, much better than my own effort … Continue reading →