Tag Archives: string theory
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, Maldacena described a ‘bridge’ between two theories that … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged anti-de Sitter space, black hole information loss, conformal field theory, holographic principle, Jacob Bekenstein, Juan Maldacena, physical information, Stephen Hawking, string theory
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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 points well, I thought: Or take protein structures. A protein’s function is largely … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged Jonathan Woit, machine learning, post-empiricism, post-theory, Richard Dawid, string theory
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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.R. Giger’s existential, visceral horrors that I so … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged black holes, compactification, high dimensions, Interstellar, Kaluza-Klein theory, Large Hadron Collider, particle accelerators, Quantum mechanics, special theory of relativity, Spectral, string theory, The Cloverfield Paradox, wave function, wavefunction
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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 centuries before John Dalton showed up). The story in … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Acharya Kanad, aesthetics, Alfred Shapere, dichotomy, empiricism, epistemology, formal science, Frank Wilczek, Hilary Putnam, history, knowledge, naturalness, nature science, Philosophy of Science, rationalism, sense experience, Social Sciences, string theory, time crystals
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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 epistemological backdrop against which string theory proclaimed its … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged aesthetics, Brian Greene, Edward Witten, Lorentzian contractions, Paul Aspinwall, principle of relativity, Quantum mechanics, science communication, string theory, superstrings, The Elegant Universe, time dilation
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‘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 recognizes ‘promising researchers’ and comes with a … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged AdS/CFT correspondence, Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Infosys Foundation Prize, New Horizons in Physics Prize, quantum field theory, Shiraz Minwalla, string theory, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
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