Monthly Archives: September 2005

Lisa Randall has an Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times entitled Dangling Particles. The title seems to have little to do with the piece, but I suppose it is a play on words on “dangling participle”, a term for … Continue reading →

Mathematician Dave Morrison is giving a colloquium talk tomorrow at the KITP with the provocative title How Much Mathematics Does A Theoretical Physicist Need To Know? It should soon be available for viewing on the KITP web-site, and I’m looking … Continue reading →

I just finished reading an interesting new book by astrophysicist Mario Livio. It’s called The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved, and the subtitle is “How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry”. Livio’s topic is the idea of a symmetry … Continue reading →

I realize that this is a low form of entertainment, but reading Lubos Motl’s blog today has definitely livened up my birthday, which in recent years has been a rather sad occasion. It’s hard to say what is the funniest … Continue reading →

The October issue of the Notices of the AMS is now available on-line. It has an interesting historical article about Henri Poincare, and a short expository article called WHAT IS… a Pseudoholomorphic Curve by Simon Donaldson. Counting these pseudo-holomorphic curves … Continue reading →

The latest issue of Astronomy magazine has two articles hyping the landscape/multiverse/anthropic principle and cosmic superstrings. Many well-known theorists are quoted supporting the anthropic principle and the multiverse, including Joe Polchinski, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Martin Rees, Max Tegmark, Alexander Vilenkin, Alan … Continue reading →

During the last couple days, some interesting commentary on quantum gravity has appeared at a couple places on the web. One is at John Baez’s latest edition of his proto-blog This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics. John is mainly writing … Continue reading →