Me, Piccolino and the Needles.
Here are introductions to string theory by Mike Green and John Pierre and Peter Woit's original rant against it. Take your pick. Better still, synthesize, but delete Lubos Motl's expletives first. (My personal view: to paraphrase Talleyrand, string theory is never as strong as it looks, string theory is never as weak as it looks. Of course string theory, defined as the theory of extended objects [necessarily] moving in higher-dimensional spacetimes, is certain to be mathematically rich. Does physics need it? Well, it seems to imply, and relate in unexpected ways, an improbably large range of conventional physics if it doesn't.) This is an excellent article about the cultural differences between pure mathematics and theoretical physics.
I help organize the North British Mathematical Physics Seminar, an LMS-funded collaboration between Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, Durham and York theoretical physicists, and the annual UK meetings on 'Integrable Models, Conformal Field Theory and Related Topics'. I am a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.
I am one of the organizers of the Strong
Fields, Integrability and Strings programme at the Isaac Newton Institute at Cambridge
in the second half of 2007. This does not, however, make me a string
theorist!
Teaching
Lecture course material and final-year
projects are all now on the department's Moodle VLE.
Administration
Personal
Some random reading:
The Institute of Druidic Technology
The House of Lords Select Committee on Science's report
on complementary and alternative medicine,
and a brief comment on it. This is what Joseph
Conrad thought of the
supernatural (give or take a comma).
Here's Immanuel Kant's
definition of Enlightenment.
John Baez
Maxwell on Middlemarch as Solar Myth
Work
and play in Arthur Ransome
The
Archbishop
of Glasgow's Monition of Cursing against the Border Reivers
Kelvin is Lord!
The Skeptic
Dihydrogen monoxide - ban this
dangerous
chemical!
Martian
What's in the Tate
Modern?
The Sokal
hoax: start with his paper 'Transgressing
the boundaries....'
The University of Bums
on Seats.
The medium is the message: generate a postmodern
essay.