Links

Scientific Resources

If you are doing (theoretical) physics, it is fortunately most of the time enough to rely on information you can obtain from the internet. First of all, one has to mention the arXives, which provide you with most of the papers written since 1991. If you are doing high-energy physics, there is the further useful web page of SLAC Spires, which allows you to search through most of the hep papers ever published. It also comes with a powerful citation database which makes the search for relevant literature really convenient. Furthermore, there is a huge collection of lecture notes and review papers in all areas of physics found at The Net Advance of Physics.

Whenever you are in need of a mathematical definition or some background information on a certain class of objects, one should try MathWorld, Planet Math and - surprisingly - the allmighty Wikipedia. Furthermore, there are the math sections of the famous arXiv, a helpful frontend for the latter and the homepage of MathSciNet.

Science related blogs

Some blogs have developed into quite a useful source for news in the string and high-energy physics community. Here is a short selection:

• This week's find in mathematical physics by John Baez. Interesting remarks on all kinds of aspects of mathematics and physics, nearly every week.

• Another classic is Musings by Jacques Distler, which people used to check out all the time during the Strings2004 conference for reading summaries of the talks they missed because they read blogs.

• Closely related is the String Theory Coffee Table on which you find mostly reporst on recent developments in rather remote corners of the mathematical universe.

• The currently most famous (or notorious?) blog is probably Lubos Motl's reference frame, which reliably reports on all important developments in high-energy physics and string theory from the point of view of a true believer. The political attitudes brought forth in this blog are, however, weird in the best case but most of the time quite shocking.

• Lubos traditional opponent in the blogosphere is apparently Peter Woit, who writes about all kinds of issues related to high-energy physics. Most of the time, however, he will complain about how bad string theory is in predicting anything.

• Another blog is Matthias Ihl's googolplexus where he posts about all kinds of issues.

• Cosmic Variance is a nice blog of a group of scientists on all kinds of topics.

• ... and finally let me mention Reality Conditions, a blog I got to know rather recently.

Institutes I visited or worked at

Mostly for my own convenience, here is a list of the scientific institutes I had some relation to:
Physikalisches Institut der Universität Würzburg
Physics Department of The University of Texas at Austin
Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Paris
Departement des Mathematiques et applications of the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris
Centro de Estudios Cientificos, Valdivia, Chile
Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Hanover
The Abdus Salam ICTP in Trieste
Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics in Dubna, Russia.
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies

Fun

My favorite page for cartoons is Nicht lustig, which will certainly give you a pretty good idea of my sense of humor. The pages of Titanic have become rather unrecommendable as their jokes are now both politically incorrect and essentially non-funny.

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