Monthly Archives: December 2005

The 23rd Jerusalem Winter School in Theoretical Physics started yesterday. The topic is “String Theory: Symmetries and Dynamics”, and it is organized by David Gross and Eliezer Rabinovici. Some of the talks are already available on-line, with the quality of … Continue reading →

Eckhard Meinrenken has been teaching a course at Toronto on Lie groups and Clifford algebras, and he has lecture notes available. This is beautiful mathematics and brings together several of my favorite mathematical topics: Clifford algebras, spinors, and representation theory … Continue reading →

Over the last month or so I’ve sent repeated requests to the arXiv to have trackbacks posted for several of my weblog postings. The first of these requests, back in early November, was answered positively by “mjf”, and the trackback … Continue reading →

This week’s issue of Nature has short articles by Atiyah and Witten, both addressing the issue of the current state of string theory. Atiyah’s piece is an interesting review of Lawrence Krauss’s new book Hiding in the Mirror entitled Pulling … Continue reading →

Someone wrote in to tell me about a very interesting interview with Alain Connes, conducted at the IPM in Teheran at the time of the Workshop on Non-Commutative Geometry held there this past September. As always, Connes has quite a … Continue reading →

There’s an interview with Susskind in the latest issue of New Scientist by Amanda Gefter, entitled Is String Theory in Trouble? Susskind makes many of the same points as in his recent book The Cosmic Landscape: mixing up positivism and … Continue reading →

Various and assorted things that may be of interest: Joshua Roebke at Seed has accumulated opinions about the landscape from various physicists. No real surprises; Witten wins the award for most non-committal: I just don’t have anything incisive to say. … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago one Nobel prize winner put out an article promoting the idea of adopting anthropic reasoning as a new paradigm of how to do theoretical physics. More recently another Nobelist, Frank Wilczek, has to some degree followed … Continue reading →

Princeton University has just announced the formation of a new Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics, to be led by Curtis Callan (who was my thesis advisor). Interestingly, the concept of this new center seems to be to move away from … Continue reading →