Ok, so not really life — just my physics. But this title flowed better.
So far today (it’s noon), I have made some real progress on a tricky problem we’ve been working on, that looks like it might soon give some very interesting results, possibly publication-worthy. This is very good. Also today, another paper appeared online with similar results to some of our work, from a different approach. This is potentially very bad. It’s 62 pages of heavy maths, so I’m not sure how bad at this stage. Preliminarily, though, it looks like at least some of our work is not in their paper.
So yes, things might start moving quickly now.
Paul Cook 
RE publishing and the professional survival of the academia, I recently received some sound advice on how to go about that successfully. Shout if you want me to send it to you, it has some simple and handy hints on how to stagger your research yet make sure that you are viewed as making progress, etc.
Glad to hear you’re on the verge of a breakthrough, as opposed to a breakdown 🙂
Regards,
me
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So, I went to Borders to get some coffee and browse for interesting books and in the span of a couple weeks saw not one but two new books about how string theory is a dead-end.
First is The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Lee Smolin), published on Sept 19, 2006. The second is Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit), published on Sept 30, 2006. Clearly, these are at least partially in response to the success of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. But from the description, both are of the “String Theory hasn’t made any testable predictions yet”/”String theory is a solution looking for a problem” camp.
Anyway, I find it interesting that two such similar books came out so close to the same time. I hope that you get a chance to help prove these books wrong.
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