Author Archives: woit

Where Do They Go?

Posted on June 6, 2010 by woit

HEPAP has had a Demographics Committee since about 1999, charged with gathering data on what happens to young people in the US who enter the field of High Energy Physics (both theory and experiment). The latest report from the committee … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on June 3, 2010 by woit

Several blogs have now pointed out the wonderful snarXiv site, which automatically produces random plausible-sounding hep-th entries. It’s something along the same lines as the famous Postmodernism Generator. For entertainment, you can try playing snarXiv vs. arXiv. HEPAP is meeting … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

More Quantum Information Theory From String Theory

Posted on May 27, 2010 by woit

Claims made recently in the CERN Courier that string theory can be applied to Quantum Information Theory (see here) are being followed up with a new paper entitled Four-qubit entanglement from string theory which appears to claim that, despite what … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 9 Comments

Short Items

Posted on May 25, 2010 by woit

Beam intensity at the LHC continues to increase with successful collision this morning of beams containing 13 bunches of protons, producing an initial luminosity of about 1.5 x 1029cm-2s-1. This is about a factor of 1000 below the goal for … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Applying String Theory to Quantum Information Theory

Posted on May 10, 2010 by woit

There’s a remarkable article by Mike Duff in this month’s CERN Courier, arguing the case that string theory does too have important applications: in Quantum Information Theory. The claim seems to be that since the same algebraic structures appear in … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 38 Comments

LHC Update: Bing Bang Machine Could Confirm or Disprove String Theory

Posted on May 5, 2010 by woit

Today’s CERN LHCC meeting had a wide-range of reports about how the machine is doing (1 nb-1 now, 10 nb-1 over the next 5 weeks), what the experiments are seeing (charm, Ws), and what physics might be possible with the … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, This Week's Hype | 16 Comments

First Results From XENON100

Posted on May 4, 2010 by woit

The XENON100 dark matter experiment now has a paper out reporting their first results, from a test run of 11 days. They claim a 90% confidence level exclusion of 50 GeV WIMPs with a spin-independent elastic cross-section above 3 x … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 7 Comments

String Vacuum Project 2010

Posted on May 3, 2010 by woit

I’ve written before about the String Vacuum Project (back in 2006 and 2008), and there was a story about it in Nature. This week they are having an SVP 2010 Spring Meeting at the KITP, talks available here. A proposal … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 5 Comments

Oy vey

Posted on April 30, 2010 by woit

Last Friday City College held a symposium here in Manhattan celebrating physics at City College. I was able to attend just the morning session, which began with a quick rescheduling of Anton Zeilinger for David Gross, who had overslept. Gross … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 20 Comments

Bohmian Spat

Posted on April 29, 2010 by woit

Here’s a story from the boundaries of conventional physics of the sort I normally try to resist paying any attention to, but couldn’t quite help myself this time: Last week I noticed amongst the e-mail from Jack Sarfatti that clutters … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments