Daily Archives: May 3, 2010

…is all very well, but to look for Heaven…is to live here in Hell*.

One of the things I worked a lot on in earlier months this year (and late ones of last year) was the lead article in a cluster of articles that has appeared in the last few days in May’s special edition of Physics Today. They are sort of departmental-colloquium-level articles, so for a general physics audience, more or less. It’s about some of the things I’ve told you about here in the past, concerning exciting and interesting applications of string theory to various experiments in nuclear physics, as well as atomic and condensed matter physics (although we do not have an article on the latter in this cluster). I had a fun time working with Peter Steinberg on the article and remain grateful to him for getting us all together in the first place to talk about this topic way back in that AAAS symposium of 2009. It was there that Steven Blau of Physics Today got the idea to approach us all to do an article, which resulted in this special issue.

My article with Peter Steinberg, “What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles “, is here, and the pdf is freely downloadable (update: alternative link here). It is mostly about the theoretical aspects of the whole business and the relevance of the string theory […] Click to continue reading this post →