Luboš Motl

Luboš Motl
Luboš Motl in 2011
Born	(1973-12-05) 5 December 1973 Plzeň, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic)
Fields	Theoretical Physics, String Theory
Alma mater	Charles University, Rutgers University
Doctoral advisor	Tom Banks

Luboš Motl (born December 5, 1973) is a Czech theoretical physicist and commentator on physics, global warming and politics. His scientific research concentrated on string theory, of which he has been a passionate defender. He proposed Matrix string theory in 1997.

Life and career

Motl was born in Plzeň, present-day Czech Republic. 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. It was during his years at Harvard that Motl started his blog, "Luboš Motl's Reference Frame". In 2007, he left Harvard and returned to the Czech Republic. Since then, Motl has not published on string theory.

While in Harvard, 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 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'équation Bogdanov, a book published in France discussing the scientific ideas and controversy of the Bogdanov brothers.

Motl keeps a blog mainly discussing general science and conservative politics. The blog discusses new discoveries in string theory and theoretical physics, often clarifies commonly discussed physics topics in the popular media, and points out common errors found in `alternative' theories of physics (such as violations of Lorentz invariance, causality, unitarity, etc). He has been a prominent critic of loop quantum gravity, Garrett Lisi's "E8 Theory", and entropic gravity. He also frequently disputes what he considers to be alarmism about global warming, and some of the statistical models used by some climate researchers on grounds such as incorrect prior probability distributions. His political comments include comparing Islam to Nazism and expressing sympathy for Anders Breivik's idea of a necessary war to prevent Europe from "becoming a part of the Islamic civilization", though he disagreed with Breivik's methods and his respect for Al-Qaeda.

He counts himself as a Christian atheist, but this seems more to do with anti-Islamic sentiment, belief in Western values and the cultural influence of Christianity than with the tenets and content of Christianity itself.

Publications

• 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
• Proposals on nonperturbative superstring interactions
• all publications listed

External links

• Luboš Motl's blog
• "The World of Science Becomes a Global Village; Archive Opens a New Realm of Research", James Glanz, New York Times, May 1, 2001
• "Theorists snap over string pieces", Geoff Brumfiel, Nature News, October 5, 2006
• [1], list of publications on spires