Yearly Archives: 2007

There’s an interesting exchange today between Sean Carroll and George Johnson on bloggingheads.tv. They cover a range of topics, including the controversy over string theory and the role of blogs. Johnson describes his time last fall at the KITP, telling … Continue reading →

The public perception of string theory has definitely changed over the last few years, with the latest evidence this week’s cover story in New Scientist, which begins: It’s the theory everyone loves to hate. The article (available fully only to … Continue reading →

I was on vacation for a while, but haven’t been posting much mostly since there’s not that much to write about. Like every summer, there are huge numbers of string theory conferences going on all over the world, but from … Continue reading →

I’ve been finding recently that an increasing serious problems with blogs is that there are too many good ones with material worth reading. I’ve learned quite a lot recently from many well-informed blog postings, but the sheer number of these … Continue reading →

Yesterday Sean Carroll and I appeared on the BBC Radio 4 program The Material World, in a segment on String theory – knot good enough?, about the controversy over string theory. The segment started with a piece from the play … Continue reading →

Experimenters at the Tevatron have released data showing the existence of a new baryon, built out of a down, strange and bottom quark, and having a mass of 5.774 +/- .019 GeV. It has been given the name “Ξb“. The … Continue reading →

Pretty much everybody in the math community seems to be getting a blog. Many of the new bloggers are quite good research mathematicians (including even some Fields Medalists). Two very new ones are: Secret Blogging Seminar: Named after a “Secret … Continue reading →

Last week both SLAC and Fermilab hosted “Users Meetings”, providing a forum to discuss the current status and future plans of the two laboratories. The SLAC agenda is here, and talks from previous years are available here, with this year’s … Continue reading →

Yesterday evening there was a public debate about string theory held in Paris, between Lee Smolin and Thibault Damour. So far, accounts of the debate have appeared in Le Monde and at Fabien Besnard’s blog Mathephysique. The Le Monde article … Continue reading →