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Yet another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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Tue, 30 May 2006
A Tutorial on String Theory
A week or so ago, I was poking around the PBS website, looking for free
stuff to watch. Saw this series, narrated by a famous Columbia string
theorist. It's a good introduction to String Theory. Unless you know
quite a bit about String Theory, you'll almost certainly learn more and
probably enjoy it quite a bit. Here's the page with the videos. The videos are in short pieces which is a bit irritating, but as I said before, it's worth it.
As an aside, it's a sad commentary on my knowledge of modern physics that I am getting my contemporary physics education from TV, but hey, it's PBS, not TV! And it's better than nothing.
As another aside, I was chatting with a friend who does String Theory. He says that the String Theory community is fairly small (about 300 people, he said) but incredibly competitive; it is not uncommon for people to be scooped. And there are lots of prima donnas and arrogant bastards. Computer science is positively civil, by comparison. Computational biology too, though less so than computer science.