The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook has a new web-site, and this week their annual summer workshop got underway, talks available in very high quality video here. Luca Mazzucato, a postdoc there, has started putting together an Outreach section of the web-site, which now includes some wonderful interviews with various theorists, often covering topics well-known on this blog. The last of the interviews looks the most intriguing, it promises “the formula of love”. Unfortunately, when you try and get access to this intriguing formula, for now you find that it is password-protected…
I’ll be spending much of the next two weeks on vacation in Scotland. Blogging may be light to non-existent.
There’s a new bloggingheads.tv episode on String Theory. Perhaps you should watch it while unwinding after an aggressive day hiking in the rain-swept Scottish highlands?
Thanks Fred,
The weather in Edinburgh is unusually sunny, warm and pleasant. Noticed the Bloggingheads thing a little while ago. Both John Horgan and George Musser are well-informed on the string theory controversy, with John a skeptic and George much more pro-string theory. Worth watching if you want an introduction to the controversy, probably nothing much new if you’ve been reading this blog….
Or you should just enjoy the latest Abstruse Goose:
http://abstrusegoose.com/384
Peter, here is something which is an intersting and am hoping you wil blog when youa re back.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.0868v1
Shantanu,
I don’t have anything really new to say about that. Lee Smolin’s article back in 2003
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0303185
seems to me to have done much the same thing, quite a bit more thoroughly, and I don’t see that much has changed since then.