Asymptotia

Just in case you’re up for a short talk at the top of Mount Wilson followed by an evening of observing through the historic telescopes on Saturday 25th July… this might be for you!

[A more technical post follows] My most recent paper, out on the arXiv today, is very exciting to me because it seems to be a genuinely new way of computing some important quantities and it is devilishly simple.

I started a tradition a little while back where every year we have a special departmental colloquium entitled "The Nobel Prize in Physics: Who/What/Why".

There’s a lot of joyful knife-work in my future.

Well, I can now officially mention that I've been part of the filmmaking team (in a way) working hard to bring you an enjoyable and interesting Fantastic Four movie!

[More technical post follows.]

In January 2024 I wrote a paper showing how to define the Supersymmetric Virasoro Minimal String* (SVMS) as a random matrix model, compute many of its properties, and indeed predict many aspects of its physics.

Some years ago I speculated that it would nice if a certain mathematical object existed, and even nicer if it were to satisfy an ordinary differential equation of a special sort.

This week’s lectures on instantons in my gauge theory class (a very important kind of theory for understanding many phenomenon in nature – light is an example of a phenomenon that is described by gauge theory) were a lot of fun to do, and mark the culmina…

Thanks to everyone who made all those kind remarks in various places last month after my mother died.

I've been very quiet here over the last couple of weeks.

I’m a baker, as you probably know.

The good news (following from last post) is that it worked out!

The delicious chaos that (almost always) eventually tames into a tasty flaky pastry crust… it’s always a worrying mess to start out, but you trust to your experience, and you carry on, with hope.

I realised just now that I entirely forgot (it seems) to post about an episode of PBS' show Nova called "Decoding the Universe: Cosmos" which aired back in the Spring.