For those of you willing to stay up late, there will be a total eclipse of the moon on August 28 visible to various extents over most of the western hemisphere and some of east Asia. The show is a little late for me (some might call it early) as I’m on the east coast […]
Category: Guest Bloggers
For Your Weekend Enjoyment
Or, “Stealing Chad’s Ideas: First in a Series”. When you write ‘log’, do you mean base 10 or base e? What field do you work in? Update: Or base 2 for you CS-types.
Maldacena on the Beach
As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently attending the Simons Workshop in Mathematics and Physics at Stony Brook University. The weather finally warmed up today, and we relocated to Smith Point Beach to hear Juan Maldacena tell us a bit about AdS/CFT and gluon scattering. If you’re looking for a precis of the talk, I’m afraid […]
What is this “blog” you speak of
Some things I’ve noticed lately: Anton Zeilinger (Vienna) has a blog. It’s in German, but that shouldn’t be a problem, right? I found that out at Michael Nielsen’s place, where he’s started blogging again after a little hiatus. In an effort to improve on my bibdesk+bibtex+folder-full-of-local-pdfs system, I’ve been playing around citeulike, Papers, and Nielsen’s […]
Crystal healing
Lest this blog turn into a one-trick pony, let me tell you what I did today that’s of a little different flavor. I epoxied some stuff onto some other stuff. More importantly, I calculated a band structure. This amazes me. Sure, all you squa^Wsolid-state types out there do this every day, over your cereal even, […]
Alone in the Multiverse
The LHC is coming, and it’s time to place your bets. What do you do? (Fun though it may be, shooting the hostage doesn’t really help here.) We’re committed Bayesians (for the sake of this post, at least), and we want to assign a probability that the LHC will see supersymmetry. More generally, we have […]
New York in August
I’m here at the Simons Workshop at Stony Brook out on Long Island. I’d like to talk a bit about the workshop later, but right now I just want to note that it is 56 degrees out. In New York. In the middle of August. Thunderstorms I’d understand, but cold, dreary drizzle? It’s August, not […]
Twisty Little Universes, All Alike
When we left our story, we were stuck in the unfortunate position of living somewhere in a multiverse without any a priori way to figure out where we live. What might we do?
Ask a String Theorist: Update
Thanx to everyone for all the interesting questions in the previous thread. I apologize for not being able to answer every one of them. I just arrived at a workshop on Long Island, and I’m also feeling a bit under the weather. From what I’ve seen so far, I think I will do a post […]
The Lay of the Landscape
Let’s say you have a theory, and, let’s say it happens to have a whole lot of solutions. Maybe it’s the theory you’re thinking about, but it doesn’t have to be. Nothing of what I’m going to say depends on any details besides this surfeit of solutions.