Monthly Archives: November 2005

Polyakovfest

Last weekend Princeton held a Special Symposium in honor of Alexander Polyakov’s 60th birthday. Witten talked about his recent work on Langlands duality. He’ll also be speaking about this next week at Rutgers and December 1 and 2 up in … Continue reading

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Latest Freed-Hopkins-Teleman

A wonderful long-promised paper by Dan Freed, Mike Hopkins and Constantin Teleman entitled Loop Groups and Twisted K-theory II has just appeared. They have advertised it in the past under various names such as “K-theory, Loop Groups and Dirac Families”, … Continue reading

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Baez on the Geometry of the Standard Model

John Baez has a very interesting new paper on the arXiv this evening entitled Calabi-Yau Manifolds and the Standard Model. In it he points out that the standard model gauge group (which he carefully defines as SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)/N, where N is … Continue reading

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Krauss New York Times Essay

Lawrence Krauss has an essay in today’s New York Times about science, religion and string theory, covering much the same material discussed here in a recent posting. There are postings about this from Mark Trodden at Cosmic Variance and Lubos … Continue reading

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Weinberg Goes Anthropic

As a commenter here noted last night, and other commenters have discussed in the last posting, Steven Weinberg has just put on the arXiv an article entitled Living in the Multiverse. In it, he correctly points out that theoretical physics … Continue reading

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Nekrasov, Pure Spinors and the Berkovits Superstring

There’s a new paper out tonight by Nikita Nekrasov entitled Lectures on curved beta-gamma system, pure spinors, and anomalies. Motivated by questions about the covariant superstring quantization method being studied in recent years by Berkovits, Nekrasov considers a sigma model … Continue reading

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