Author Archives: woit

Recent Talk

I gave a “Spacetime is Right-handed” talk yesterday, part of a series entitled Octonions, standard model and unification. The slides are here, video should appear here. Much of the talk was devoted to explaining the usual relation between spinors and … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

P5 Report

There is a HEPAP meeting going on today, with release of the long-awaited P5 report prioritizing future HEP spending. The report is available here now, to be officially unveiled later in the day and discussed at the HEPAP meeting. The … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Unification, Spinors, Twistors, String Theory

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 | 22 Comments

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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