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Theories of physics beyond the Standard Model predict the existence of relativistic strings, either as composite objects, or as fundamental constituents of matter. If they were created in the Big Bang, they would very likely still be present in the universe today. This talk reviews the thirty year history of cosmic strings, and describes the latest work which finds intriguing hints in the Cosmic Microwave Background data that the universe is filled with string.

To realize massive pions, I propose a variation of the holographic model of massless QCD using the D4/D8/D8bar-brane configuration proposed by Sakai and Sugimoto. The deformation breaks the chiral symmetry explicitly and I compute the mass of the pions and vector mesons. The observed value of the pion mass can be obtained. I also argue a chiral perturbation corresponding to the deformation.

Anthropic arguments based on selection effects for observers have been claimed to succesfully explain the measured value of the cosmological constant.In this talk I review the fundations of such claims in the context of probability theory and show that different (and equally legitimate) ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an explicit example, I discuss a weighting scheme based on the total number of possible observations that observers can carry out over the entire lifetime of the Universe. I show that this leads to an extremely small probability for observing a value of the cosmological constant equal to or greater than what we now measure, in marked contrast with the usual result. I also discuss principles of consistent probabilistic reasoning, showing that the anthropic principle as applied in most of the literature is logically inconsistent. I conclude that current implementations of the anthropic principle display a worrysome lack of predictivity, and cannot be used to explain the value of the cosmological constant, nor, likely, any other physical parameters.

Abstract: This group of astronomical order is slowly yielding its secrets.It is the symmetry group of a rational conformal field theory. In thisintroductory talk, I will discuss the functions that constitute monstrousmoonshine and explain the importance of the monster group and itsconnections with better established parts of mathematics