Prediction isn't the right method to learn about the past

Happy New Year 2013 = 33 * 61! The last day of the year is a natural moment for a blog entry about time. At various moments, I wanted to wri...

Richard Dawkins vs Peter Higgs

The reverse fundamentalist vs the peaceful atheist Two days ago, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and other mostly British outlets amplified an...

Amplitudes, permutations, Grassmannians

Back in July, I mentioned some new highly intriguing results by a group of physicists and mathematicians including Nima Arkani-Hamed and oth...

Christmas rumor: \(105\GeV\) dimuon excess at 5 sigma

Update: The best physicist on the territory of Argentina right now, Paul Frampton, wrote me that the signal could perhaps be a sign of a di...

Obama gives medal to Drell, Gates, Mazur

I hate honors but this list is kind of interesting. Barack Obama gave the National Medal of Science to 12 scientists and the National Medal ...

SciAm, firewalls, and deterioration of the physics community

Jennifer Ouellette wrote a nice piece on black hole firewalls for the Simons Foundation and for Scientific American: Black Hole Firewalls C...

Subir Sachdev on AdS/CMT

Yes, it's the date of another major failed end of the world ;-) My ex-colleague and fellow superhero , condensed matter physicist Subir ...

Czechia opposes harsh anti-smoking EU policies

European health commissioner Tonio Borg (Malta) – who has been in this job just for one month – is behind the latest insanely harsh EU propo...

Hawking, Nurse, Rees, lords demand Alan Turing's pardon

The Atlantic and others reveal that Stephen Hawking along with Paul Nurse, Martin Rees, and many lords I don't know wrote a petition t...

Energy from man-made tornadoes

Peter Thiel, a favorite venture capitalist of mine, just paid $300,000 to Louis Michaud, a Canadian inventor on the picture below who plans...

Anti-string delusions and political correctness

A science babe working for the Huffington Post left-wing website recorded a video interview with Mark Jackson who is now in Paris: The title...

Victor Hess, Joseph Henry: anniversaries

Victor Franz Hess (24 June 1883 – 17 December 1964) was born to a royal forester in Waldstein Castle, Styria (South Austria proper). He att...

Exorcising Maxwell's daemons

And the lowest allowed power consumption of PCs In our discussions about information and heat , James Gallagher said some of the usual wrong...