...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
Embiggen, the fauxcabulary word created for an episode of The Simpsons, has found its way into string theory. Here's the usage from a recently published paper on Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking:
Here's the original quote from The Simpsons episode, Lisa the Iconoclast:
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
The uses are probably not related, but you never know.
Jim Holt reports on a pair of books that argue that string theory is hurting theoretical physics. The article contains a good overview of the history and current status of the theory. For those looking to discover which book is better, Holt recommends Smolin's The Trouble with Physics.
On the heels of two books critical of string theory, a look at the string theory backlash.
Interesting tour/visualization imagining 10 dimensions. (thx, james)
Robert Birnbaum interviews physicist Lisa Randall about string theory and science popularizers.
Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum have proposed some ideas about gravity, extra dimensionality, and string theory that may be testable when the Large Hadron Collider goes online at CERN in 2007.
The existence and behavior of dark matter is puzzling indeed, but some UK astrophysicists speculate that adding three more spacial dimensions to the universe explains the gravitational behavior of dark matter. If they exist, these extra dimensions would be about a nanometer across. A baby step toward string theory?
Advice from Dr. Michio Kaku on formulating a proposal for the Unified Field Theory. I can just imagine all the crackpot theories that prompted this list.
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