Author Archives: woit

QCD at $\theta=\pi$

Posted on September 15, 2017 by woit

Earlier this week Zohar Komargodski (who is now at the Simons Center) visited Columbia, and gave a wonderful talk on recent work he has been involved in that provides some new insight into a very old question about QCD. Simplifying … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Modern Theories of Quantum Gravity

Posted on September 7, 2017 by woit

Quanta magazine today has a column by Robbert Dijkgraaf that comes with the abstract: Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Modern Geometry

Posted on September 4, 2017 by woit

This semester I’m teaching the first semester of Modern Geometry, our year-long course on differential geometry aimed at our first-year Ph.D. students. A syllabus and some other information about the course is available here. In the spring semester Simon Brendle … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

This and That

Posted on August 29, 2017 by woit

The Stacks Project (see an earlier post here) had a very successful workshop in Ann Arbor earlier this month. This is a remarkable effort pioneered by Johan de Jong to produce a high quality open source reference for the field … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Road Trip

Posted on August 14, 2017 by woit

Blogging will be light to non-existent for the next ten days or so, as I head out west on a road trip to see next Monday’s solar eclipse. Current plan is to fly to Denver tomorrow, pick up a vehicle, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

GR=QM?

Posted on August 10, 2017 by woit

In recent years a hot topic in some theoretical physics circles has been the 2013 “ER=EPR” conjecture first discussed by Maldacena and Susskind here. Every so often I try and read something explaining what this is about, but all such … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments

Cosmology for the Curious

Posted on August 8, 2017 by woit

There’s a new college-level textbook out, Cosmology for the Curious, targeted at physics courses designed to explain basics of cosmology to non-physics majors. The authors are Delia Perlov and Alex Vilenkin. Back in 2006 Vilenkin published a popular book promoting … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews, Multiverse Mania | 26 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on August 4, 2017 by woit

For representation theory aficionados, George Lusztig has put on the arXiv a long document with comments on his papers (for a bit more about him, see this). For a new idea exemplifying the potential grand unification of mathematics and physics, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

A Few Items

Posted on July 25, 2017 by woit

Just a few items: The Simons Foundation has announced a new Origins of the Universe initiative, which will fund efforts to “develop testable predictions about string theory, quantum gravity and a cosmological ‘Big Bounce.’” I don’t think even all of … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

What the Hell is Going On?

Posted on July 22, 2017 by woit

I’ve looked at the talks from a few of the HEP experiment and phenomenology summer conferences. If anyone can point me to anything interesting that I’ve missed, please do so. The lack of new physics beyond the Higgs at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 34 Comments