Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.

155. Witten explains how to quantize gauge theory

Long time (almost 6 months?) ago Peter Woit wrote about Yau Birthday Conference and briefly mentioned the talk Edward Witten gave there. I was wondering is there preprint going to appear some day with outline of this talk, and it has finally appeared yesterday in ArXiv. As you can imagine after reading the title and [...]

154. Solutions to problems from Polchinski, String theory

A rather incredible paper was recently published in ArXiv – Matthew Headrick decided to solve all problems in both volumes of Joe Polchinski’s “String theory” (well, not quite, actually about 80 problems out of 200 ) and publish them as a paper. I think, actually, the best way (well, definitely better than reading text books [...]

152. Volume of the Universe after inflation

Back to work after a way too short Xmas break Since we were recently a bit into black hole complementarity and information loss paradox, maybe it is also worth discussing a bit the physics of de Sitter space. In a sense, de Sitter is (not so close) relative of the Schwarzschild black hole: metric of the latter looks somewhat similar [...]

151. No blogging for Xmas!

Hehe, I am nerdy, that’s true, but I’m not that nerdy Merry Christmas again to you, readers of NEQNET!

150. Susskind’s lectures on quantum entanglement

Discussing black holes and information loss paradox with Lubos, I decided to return back to basics. Here comes the nicest basic introduction into quantum entanglement – Susskind’s lectures on the subject in Stanford U. given back in 2006. Be prepared for almost 15 hours of fun

149. Towers of vacua in SUSY field theories

Reading the previous post about dynamical RG treatment of the fractal surface growth problem some of you may have recalled that several months ago we (me, Niko Jokela and Jaydeep Majumder) have used dynamical RG methods to describe behavior of eternal inflation on a nearly continuous landscape. Later, I have also applied these methods to [...]

148. On surface growth

As Barabasi and Stanley state in the book “Fractal concepts of surface growth“, most of our life takes place on the surface of something. Indeed, authors of several thousands of paper citing the Randall-Sundrum seminal work take seriously the idea that our 4-dimensional world is localized on the surface of a membrane located in turn [...]

147. Death of blogosphere, birth of blogosphere and Christmas wishes

1. So, death or birth? Recently, too many people simultaneously started claiming that “the blogosphere is dead” – see, for example, the post by Nicholas Carr who started the desperation or the Bee’s blog post where she explains who actually killed the blogosphere (capitalist imperialist pigs, who else might have wanted to do that?). Actually, [...]

146. Offtopic – are there any webmasters reading this blog?

I am sure there should be some (Pascal? ). Maybe the following info will seem interesting for you – John Chow is going to give away a copy of John Reese’s “Traffic secrets 2.0″. The latter is currently sold by Income.com for 397 USD. As for me, I once saw John Reese’s seminar on conversion [...]

145. Quantum and thermal decay in de Sitter space

Yesterday there was an interesting talk at Perimeter Institute – Adam Brown from Columbia University has discussed vacuum decay in de Sitter space. The title in the announcement immediately caught me, since I expected that Adam was actually going to discuss instability of de Sitter space, the subject I am currently working on. Then I [...]