String theory and reconciliations
According to particle physics, the fundamental building blocks of the universe are point-like particles, essentially small dots of energy with no dimension. String theory posits that these dots are ac…
string theory
7 posts
25 years of Maldacena's bridge
Twenty-five years go, in 1997, an Argentine physicist named Juan Martin Maldacena published what would become the most highly cited physics paper in history (more than 20,000 to date). In the paper, M…
Getting ahead of theory, experiment, ourselves
Science journalist Laura Spinney wrote an article in The Guardian on January 9, 2022, entitled 'Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?'. This excerpt from the article captures its…
All the science in 'The Cloverfield Paradox'
I watched The Cloverfield Paradox last night, the horror film that Paramount pictures had dumped with Netflix and which was then released by Netflix on February 4. It's a dumb production: unlike H…
Some notes on empiricism, etc.
The Wire published a story about the 'atoms of Acharya Kanad' (background here; tl;dr: Folks at a university in Gujarat claimed an ancient Indian sage had put forth the theory of atoms centuri…
The intricacies of being sold on string theory
If you are seeking an appreciation for the techniques of string theory, then Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe could be an optional supplement. If, on the other hand, you want to explore the epistem…
'No string theorists in non-elite institutions'
Shiraz Naval Minwalla, a professor of theoretical physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, won the New Horizons in Physics Prize for 2013 on November 5. The prize – which…