Author Archives: woit

Unification, Spinors, Twistors, String Theory

Posted on November 22, 2023 by woit

Last month I recorded a podcast with Curt Jaimungal for his Theories of Everything site, and it’s now available with audio here, on Youtube here. There are quite a few other programs on the site well worth watching. Much of … Continue reading →

Posted in Euclidean Twistor Unification, Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Spacetime is Right-handed v. 2.0 and Some Notes on Spinors and Twistors

Posted on October 30, 2023 by woit

I’ve just replaced the old version of my draft “spacetime is right-handed” paper (discussed here) with a new, hopefully improved version. If it is improved, thanks are due to a couple people who sent helpful comments on the older version, … Continue reading →

Posted in Euclidean Twistor Unification | 18 Comments

Analytic Stacks

Posted on October 19, 2023 by woit

Dustin Clausen and Peter Scholze are giving a course together this fall on Analytic Stacks, with Clausen lecturing at the IHES, Scholze from Bonn. Here’s the syllabus: The purpose of this course is to propose new foundations for analytic geometry. … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 13 Comments

Spacetime is Right-handed

Posted on October 9, 2023 by woit

I’ve finally managed to write up something short about an idea I’ve been working on for the last few months, so now have a preliminary draft version of a paper tentatively entitled Spacetime is Right-handed. One motivation for this is … Continue reading →

Posted in Euclidean Twistor Unification | 17 Comments

Frenkel on String Theory

Posted on September 20, 2023 by woit

Curt Jaimungal’s Theories of Everything podcast has a new episode featuring a long talk with Edward Frenkel (by the way, I’ll be doing one of these next month). A few months ago I wrote about a Lex Fridman podcast with … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

What Does Spec Z Look Like?

Posted on September 14, 2023 by woit

This week Laurent Fargues has started a series of lectures here at Columbia on Some new geometric structures in the Langlands program. Videos are available here, but unfortunately there is a problem with the camera in that room, making the … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 24 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on August 24, 2023 by woit

The math department at Columbia this fall will be hosting three special lecture series, each with some connection to physics (at least in my mind…): Sergiu Klainerman will be lecturing on the proof of nonlinear stability for slowly rotating black … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture, Uncategorized | 13 Comments

The Philosophy of Supersymmetry

Posted on August 16, 2023 by woit

A few months back I saw a call for papers for a volume on “Establishing the philosophy of supersymmetry”. For a while I was thinking of writing something, since the general topic of supersymmetry is a complex and interesting one, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Strings 2023

Posted on July 28, 2023 by woit

For much of the past week, I’ve been attending off and on (on Zoom) the Strings 2023 conference. This year it’s in a hybrid format, with 200 participants in person at the Perimeter Institute, and another 1200 or so on … Continue reading →

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 18 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on July 18, 2023 by woit

Nanopoulos and co-authors have predictions from superstring theory that are “in strong agreement with NANOGrav data.” He has been at this now for almost 40 years. See for instance Experimental Predictions from the Superstring from 1985, where the superstring predicted … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 11 Comments