“Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection.”
- Hermann Weyl
[Strings 2026]
[School + Conference]
I hope the organizers upload the videos from these two events.
1 - Pre-strings School: https://t.co/FT8MiOVhtX
2 - Strings 2026: https://t.co/PKaMYbuMUB
@NikoSarcevic@WKCosmo Weinberg’s picture was that QFT is essentially not an additional assumption at all. He saw it as a natural consequence of combining special relativity and QM. From that point of view it would be reasonable to have all roads eventually lead there 👍🤔
Who are these imaginary people?
This is just science populism crap.
“Scientists sit on their hands and believe they’re all done while I ask the big questions.”
No. They don’t.
The level of self congratulatory delusion and misleading science populist nonsense is staggering.
The most amusing aspect of this sub tweet is that Sabine’s entire schtick is built around belly aching that physicists are disconnected from reality and not following the experimental signposts that the universe is presenting.
But untestable superdeterminism or superluminal 1/n
Hayek: “The man who has learned a little science lacks the humility the real scientist gladly acquires.”
“The typical intellectual believes everything must be explainable, but a scientist knows that a great many things are not. A good scientist is essentially a humble person.”
Professor Shiraz Minwalla on one of the most unexpected results in theoretical physics:
"Every quantum field theory under appropriate conditions is described by hydrodynamics. Maldacena claimed this particular field theory is described by Einstein gravity in AdS5."
"If both are true -- gravity must reduce to hydrodynamics. And we showed that was indeed the case."
"The fluid is mimicking the dynamics of the event horizon."
A 200 year old subject. And black holes taught us something new about it.
Juan Maldacena’s discovery of AdS/CFT correspondence did not just revolutionise physics, it got physicists singing.
In Strings’ 98, string theorists celebrated the discovery by signing “The Maldacena.” Written by string theorist Jeff Harvey and to be sang to the tune of “The Macarena” the lyrics go like this:
You start with the brane
and the brane is BPS.
Then you go near the brane
and the space is AdS.
Who knows what it means
I don't, I confess.
Ehhh! Maldacena!
Super Yang-Mills
with very large N.
Gravity on a sphere
flux without end.
Who says they're the same
holographic he contends.
Ehhh! Maldacena!
Black holes used to be
a great mystery.
Now we use D-brane
to compute D-entropy.
And when D-brane is hot
D-free energy.
Ehhh! Maldacena!
M-theory is finished
Juan has great repute.
The black hole we have mastered
QCD we can compute.
Too bad the glueball spectrum
is still in some dispute.
Ehhh! Maldacena!
in every string theory colloquium there is that one guy probably from material science with one government project which make the guy important enough to ask the question and then laugh about it in the tea
“The physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen.”
- Paul Dirac
Some years ago, I listened to the audio book, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, by Steven Weinberg.
The book was about the discovery of the scientific method, not individual scientific facts.
Here is an interview of the wise man. https://t.co/SE7natrtE6
John Preskill points out how, out of Steven Weinberg‘s 50 best known papers, 42 are single author. Weinberg was among a few great physicists like Einstein, Feynman and Dirac who largely did their best work alone.
https://t.co/oOOD3W6EfQ