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Luboš Motl (born 5 December 1973) is a Czech theoretical physicist who worked on string theory and conceptual problems of quantum gravity until 2006. Since 2007, he left academia. He currently lives in Plzeň, Czech Republic, and keeps a blog commenting on global warming, politics and physics.
Motl was born in Plzeň. He received his master degree from the Charles University in Prague, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Rutgers University and has been a Harvard Junior Fellow (2001-2004) and assistant professor (2004-2007) at Harvard University. He currently has no known academic affiliation. In July, 2007 he returned to the Czech Republic after leaving academia.
He made an important contribution to matrix and nonperturbative string theory, under the impulse of his advisor Thomas Banks. Recently he worked on the pp-wave limit of AdS/CFT correspondence; twistor theory and its application to gauge theory with supersymmetry; black hole thermodynamics and the conjectured relevance of quasinormal modes for loop quantum gravity; deconstruction, and other topics. He has a presence on the Internet, where he often participates in heated discussions supporting string theory against loop quantum gravity. Along with Urs Schreiber and Arvind Rajaraman, he founded and moderates the sci.physics.strings newsgroup.
Motl translated The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene to Czech, and together with Miloš Zahradník, he co-authored a Czech textbook on linear algebra (We Grow Linear Algebra). He also authored L'equation Bogdanov, a book published in France popularizing the scientific ideas of the Bogdanov brothers.
Motl keeps a blog mainly discussing general science and politics. In science, besides talking about string theory, he frequently criticizes what he thinks is alarmism about global warming . In politics, he was one of few Harvard faculty willing to openly defend president Lawrence Summers's controversial remarks regarding women in science. In religion, following the example of Oriana Fallaci, he counts himself "as a Christian atheist" , although he notes "how simple-minded and naive Christianity can be".
External links
Physics
- Higher-order corrections to mass-charge relation of extremal black holes
- The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as the Weakest Force
- Equivalence of twistor prescriptions for super Yang-Mills
- Cubic Twistorial String Field Theory
- Matrix string theory, contact terms, and superstring field theory
- Heterotic plane wave matrix models and giant gluons
- Asymptotic black hole quasinormal frequencies
- An analytical computation of asymptotic Schwarzschild quasinormal frequencies
- PP-Wave / CFT_2 Duality
- PP-wave string interactions from perturbative Yang-Mills theory
- Nonperturbative Formulations of Superstring Theory (Phd Thesis)
- Two-parametric zeta function regularization in superstring theory
- SCI.physics.STRINGS newsgroup