Author Archives: woit

This Week’s Hype

Posted on August 12, 2009 by woit

From Softpedia this week, the news is of a Universal Theory of the Universe in the Works. According to the article, The theory of quantum mechanics was devised around 1920, and explains all this, but without accounting for gravity. Therefore, … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 15 Comments

25 Years On…

Posted on August 6, 2009 by woit

Five years ago the 20th anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution” was being celebrated, and I wrote some postings about this history (see here, here and here). This month is the quarter-century anniversary, and I haven’t seen any evidence of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments

Various Items

Posted on August 6, 2009 by woit

CERN just issued a press release announcing the decision about the energy for the initial LHC run: 3.5 TeV/beam. The procedure for the 2009 start-up will be to inject and capture beams in each direction, take collision data for a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Back

Posted on August 5, 2009 by woit

I’ve spent most of the last month traveling, first to Latvia and Russia, then to China, finally to Seattle. Back now, looking forward to staying in one time zone and not seeing the interior of a plane for a while. … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Weinberg at CERN

Posted on July 17, 2009 by woit

Steven Weinberg was visiting CERN recently and gave a talk entitled The Quantum Theory of Fields: Effective or Fundamental? He discussed the ups and downs of the “market price” of quantum field theory, showing a decline since a peak in … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Latest From the LHC

Posted on July 15, 2009 by woit

Here’s an announcement from the CERN DG Rolf Heuer sent out to CERN employees today: The foreseen shutdown work on the LHC is proceeding well, including the powering tests with the new quench protection system. However, during the past week … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 23 Comments

BRST and Dirac Cohomology

Posted on July 11, 2009 by woit

For the last couple years I’ve been working on the idea of using what mathematicians call “Dirac Cohomology” to replace the standard BRST formalism for handling gauge symmetries. So far this is just in a toy model: gauge theory in … Continue reading →

Posted in BRST | 16 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on July 10, 2009 by woit

For the latest on the status of the LHC, see the July 2 talk of Steve Myers mentioned here earlier, and a July 8 talk (slides, video) that has some more recent news. The question of what to do about … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 18 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on July 7, 2009 by woit

A Leiden University press release headlined Physical Reality of String Theory Demonstrated is being picked up and used to generate news stories in the media. It starts off: String theory has come under fire in recent years. Promises have been … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 25 Comments

LHC Status

Posted on July 1, 2009 by woit

If you want to keep up with the latest news on the LHC status, tomorrow at 3pm Geneva time there will be a webcast of a talk by Steve Myers. The abstract reads: The status of the LHC will be … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments