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.

131. Non-gaussianities from postinflationary universe

Mark Trodden and Alessandra Silvestri have recently released a paper about signatures of non-gaussianity from the post-inflationary early Universe. The title of the paper is speaking for itself: one can immediately recall that CMB fluctuations can be generated from cosmic strings and other topological defects, i.e.,  they may be partially sourced by various phase transitions [...]

130. A question in general relativity and another poll

I have been asked the following question by one of my friends: “I know that the frame of reference determines that it is the stay-at-home twin who ages faster than the twin travelling at some fraction of light speed. Some years back, an experiment in which one of a pair of synchronized atomic clocks was [...]

129. Metamodern – the trajectory of technology

Hi friends Just wanted to let you know that Eric Drexler, considered by many as a founding father of nanotechnology, the man of great vision enormously respected by your humble correspondent , the author of “Nanosystems” and “Engines of creation“, has just made his own blog “Metamodern” open for public. It turns out that he [...]

128. Melancholy

Jim Kotsybar has just sent me his another poem, which I liked very much (as usual) and would want to share it with you. And yes, very often such a poem would reflect perfectly the mood of a physicist… RARIFIED by James Ph. Kotsybar The physicist had reached the end of equations he’d worked for [...]

127. Ashtekar at Perimeter Institute

Abhay Ashtekar has recently visited the Perimeter Institute and gave a couple of talks – about loop quantum gravity of course, since he is one of the major players in the LQG field (considered to be its inventor). I think, both of the talks are worth watching (or at least scanning through his transparencies available [...]

126. From quarks to strings. Migdal-Makeenko equation and AdS-CFT correspondence

Although Lubos wants to see my answer to the poll , I decided to finish my analysis of the recent Polyakov’s paper today. Page 6. In order to justify my picture I have used intuition coming from the loop equation, while Klebanov and Maldacena appealed to the D brane picture of the gauge fielauds. Both [...]

125. From quarks to strings. On Liouville mode, instantons and confinement in abelian theories

Alexander Polyakov have released this week a preprint about history of string theory, which is also so full of non-trivial physical ideas that I decided to list some of them in this post as well as to include my comments (or rather my ramblings ) So, here we go. On Page 2. It took some [...]

124. Talk in Munich. Regularizing correlators of curvature perturbation

This post is hopefully the last one in the series devoted to my seminar in Munich Last time I have explained why correlation functions of the scalar field on de Sitter background should be actually infrared finite. This time, using similar trick, I will argue that the correlation functions of the curvature perturbation (by curvature [...]

123. AdS/CFT and condensed matter applications

This post is going to be, I think, somewhat controversial but… if you feel that I greatly miss some important point regarding the subject, then please feel free to explain that to me in the comments. And the subject is… ta-da-da-daam… how exactly string theory may help us to solve some problems in condensed matter [...]

122. Where are quarks in the Wilson loop?

An anonymous reader from Spain asks in comments to my “Wilson loop – physical introduction” post: Why do you interpret a mathematical expresion that displays a gluon field (Amu) as a qqbar loop? Where are the q fields? Why they don’t appear in the Wilson loop but you still interpret they’re there? And where did [...]