Author Archives: woit

This Week’s Hype

Posted on June 22, 2017 by woit

I’m on vacation in Europe, not in any mood to spend more time on this than just to point out that it’s the same usual tedious string theory promotional operation from the same people who have been at this for … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 35 Comments

This Time It’s Really for Real

Posted on June 14, 2017 by woit

Twice now I’ve thought I had a finished version of the book I’ve been writing forever (see here and here). Each time it turned out that, the way the publishing process was going, I ended up having more time to … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Theory: The Book | 12 Comments

The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory

Posted on June 12, 2017 by woit

Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current state of string theory, but to the possibility … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

2018 US HEP Budget

Posted on June 6, 2017 by woit

HEPAP has been meeting the past couple days, with presentations available here. Much of the discussion is about the President’s 2018 budget proposal recently submitted to Congress, which contains drastic cuts to all sorts of programs, including for support of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Multiverse Politics

Posted on June 1, 2017 by woit

The political campaign for the multiverse continues today with a piece by Amanda Gefter at Nautilus. It’s a full-throated salvo from the Linde-Guth side of the multiverse propaganda war they are now waging, with Linde dismissing Steinhardt’s criticism as based … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 36 Comments

A Few Quick Items

Posted on May 31, 2017 by woit

I’ve had little time for blogging, and coincidentally, there seems to be little to blog about recently. Here though are a few quick items: Several people had asked me about this paper about the CC, and I had to tell … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

GAMBIT

Posted on May 23, 2017 by woit

The LHCP 2017 conference was held this past week in Shanghai, and among the results announced there were new negative results about SUSY from ATLAS with both ATLAS and CMS now reporting for instance limits on gluino masses of around … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

This Month’s Hype

Posted on May 16, 2017 by woit

It seems that a couple of the authors of the recent Cosmic Controversy letter (discussed here) are going on a campaign to embarrass the 29 physicists who were convinced to sign their letter. Andrei Linde has gone to Lubos Motl’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 49 Comments

A Cosmic Controversy

Posted on May 10, 2017 by woit

A couple months ago Scientific American published an article by Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb (also available here), which I discussed a bit here. One aspect of the article was its strong challenge to multiverse mania, calling it the “multimess” and … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 53 Comments

Some Quick Items

Posted on May 10, 2017 by woit

A few quick items, I may use this posting to add a couple more later, the next posting will discuss today’s letter to Scientific American about inflation. Today’s LHCC meeting at CERN had reports from the LHC machine and experiments. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments