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Luboš Motl (born 5 December 1973) is a Czech theoretical physicist who works on string theory and conceptual problems of quantum gravity.
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, though in July, 2007 he announced his plans to return to the Czech Republic after leaving academia. His blog lists his current location as Pilsen, Czech Republic.
Together with Robbert Dijkgraaf, Erik Verlinde, and Herman Verlinde, he is a co-founder of matrix string theory, a nonperturbative definition of string theory. 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).
Motl keeps a blog mainly about string theory but also discussing general science, politics and events at Harvard. Motl has been caustic in his remarks about Peter Woit and Lee Smolin because of their books "Not Even Wrong" and "The Trouble With Physics." They claim that the string theory program has failed and has become alarmingly close to an ideology disconnected from experiment that has weakened American theoretical physics in the top universities. George Chapline, Jr. has defended Motl's views on these matters. 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
- Luboš Motl's home page
- Lubos Motl's blog
- 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