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.

Jim Simons and C.N. Yang interviewed by Bill Zimmerman

… about math (geometry)/physics interplay. Yang: there are two types of modern math books – the ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and the ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence. Stinrood is of the latter kind. LOL Simons organizes new institute (6 faculty members, around 30 visitors per year), [...]

Google Wave

Everybody (Terence Tao for one) seems to be excited about forthcoming Google Wave, and so am I. Here is the video demonstrating some of the product’s features: I think, we are yet to see whether Google Wave is to become ultimate science collaboration tool (I signed up on their site – and hope they’ll get [...]

The coming collapse of the middle class

As usual on Saturdays, discussion of physics is forbidden (why? check out Old Testament). Let us talk a bit about global financial crisis instead , namely about work of Elizabeth Warren, professor of Harvard Law School. Elizabeth Warren was a senior consultant of Clinton’s National Bankruptcy Review Commission – the one which tried to figure [...]

Workshop on tests of gravity in Case Western – day 2: aether and modified gravity

Let me finally briefly review the reminder of the second day of the workshop. Justin Khoury (whom I knew from Perimeter years and who is in Penn now) gave the first talk afternoon – titled “observational hints of IR modified gravity”. His talk followed Nima’s, and the latter almost completely blew me away, so I [...]

Susskind’s general relativity – lecture 9

… where Leonard Susskind discusses spacetime – spacelike, timelike and lightlike directions, explains how one gets special relativity from general relativity (post-Newtonian approximation), non-relativistic limit of GR and finally … Einstein equations (hurray!)

Workshop on tests of gravity in Case Western – day 2 and Arkani-Hamed’s talk

The second day of the Workshop on Tests of Gravity (and here is my blog post about the first day) was mostly devoted to analog models (Bill Unruh, Michael Uhlmann, George Pickett) and models of modified gravity (Nima Arkani-Hamed, Justin Khoury, Stacy McGaugh, Ted Jacobson, Levon Pogosyan and Mark Wyman). Regarding analog models I don’t [...]

Susskind’s 8th lecture on general relativity

Leonard Susskind continues reading his lecture course on general relativity in U. of Stanford. Previous lectures can be found here: Lectures 1-5, Lecture 6 and Lecture 7. Susskind continues to discuss covariant derivatives, parallel transport of vectors, Ricci and Riemann tensors. In the second part of the lecture he turns to geodesics. He is terrific [...]

Workshop on tests of gravity at Case Western – day 1

Dear friends, I am sorry for being rather quiet for a while. As many of you may already know, my laptop has decided to enter coma during the trip, as a result, I was left without appropriate internet access (sporadic use of Pascal Vaudrevange’s computer is not counted, thanks, Pascal!). Although the laptop tried to [...]

One week to spend in US

At this very moment – when you are reading this – I am flying to US, where the final destination of my trip is Cleveland. The plan is to take part in the 3-day Workshop on tests of gravity and gravitational physics at Case Western Reserve U. The schedule there is very dense and workshop [...]

On gun politics and culture in US

In Russia, any talk about personal weapons/gun policy gets immediately reduced to the question of how actually effective are guns for personal self-defence on the street. On the other hand, in US general attractor seems to be discussion of the statement that personal weapons is your defence against tyranny, i.e., “armed man=free man” etc. etc. [...]