Author Archives: woit

The Quantum Story

Posted on June 8, 2011 by woit

Jim Baggott’s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments is now out here and I’ve been starting to see it in bookstores. I read most of it a year or two ago when he sent me a draft of … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 3 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on June 1, 2011 by woit

The latest New Scientist has a much larger dose of M-theory/multiverse hype than I’ve seen in one place in quite a while. There’s a four-part series on M-theory (here, here, here and here) by Mike Duff. It tells the story … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 47 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on June 1, 2011 by woit

The big news of the past couple days has been the release of more data by CDF which continues to show a bump in the invariant mass of two jets produced with a W. Resonaances gives an excellent description of … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Cycles of Time

Posted on May 27, 2011 by woit

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a review I wrote of Sir Roger Penrose’s new book Cycles of Time. The review is aimed at a much wider audience than this blog, and is the product of substantial editing to get its … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 44 Comments

Cosmological Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Posted on May 19, 2011 by woit

It seems that there’s now a new burgeoning field bringing together multiverse studies and interpretational issues in quantum mechanics. Last year Aguirre, Tegmark and Layzer came out with with Born in an Infinite Universe: a Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 64 Comments

Particle Theory Job Market 2011

Posted on May 19, 2011 by woit

By now the hiring season for tenure-track jobs is pretty much over, and for the field of particle theory some idea of the results is available at the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill. As has been usual for the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

Hawking and the Google Zeitgeist

Posted on May 16, 2011 by woit

Today is the first day of this year’s Google Zeitgeist gathering of high-powered world leaders and thinkers (described here, it seems that Google either doesn’t believe in having a web presence, or it’s a secret one. Anyway, my attempts to … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 49 Comments

The Big Bang

Posted on May 15, 2011 by woit

There’s a new film out this weekend with a particle physics theme (no string theory), called The Big Bang, starring Antonio Banderas. I figured that it’s my duty to cover this kind of popular culture use of particle physics, so … Continue reading →

Posted in Film Reviews | 13 Comments

Recent NSF Grants

Posted on May 11, 2011 by woit

In responding to a comment on the previous posting, I was curious if one could easily get some data on relative sizes of grants in mathematics and physics, so started to do a quick search on nsf.gov. Among the first … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 29 Comments

Pricey Strings

Posted on May 11, 2011 by woit

In recent years most of the conferences I’ve attended have been mathematics and mathematical physics ones, and I had noticed that, while modest registration fees were often a feature many years ago, these days most such conferences, especially in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments