Author Archives: woit

Why Colliders Have Two Detectors

Posted on May 20, 2009 by woit

Last year the D0 collaboration at the Tevatron published a claim of first observation of an Ωb particle (a baryon containing one bottom and two strange quarks), with a significance of 5.4 sigma and a mass of 6165 +/- 16.4 … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 12 Comments

Feynman Diagrams and Beyond

Posted on May 16, 2009 by woit

The Spring 2009 IAS newsletter is out, available online here. It includes the news that the IAS is stealing yet another physics faculty member from Harvard, with Matias Zaldarriaga moving there in the fall. The cover story of the newsletter … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Austria May Leave CERN

Posted on May 12, 2009 by woit

I mentioned this here when I first heard about it, but by now more information is available. Last Thursday the Austrian government announced their intention to withdraw from membership in CERN, effective late 2010. This decision still needs to be … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 17 Comments

New York Events

Posted on May 12, 2009 by woit

I’m afraid that most of you have already missed one event here in New York involving someone who blogs about high energy physics. This was Tommaso Dorigo’s visit this Sunday to New York for a few hours. Luckily for you, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Spinning the Superweb

Posted on May 12, 2009 by woit

Oswaldo Zapata is a young string theorist who recently got his Ph.D. in the subject in Rome. He recently wrote to me to tell me about some essays on the history of superstring theory that he has written, which he … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments

Star Trek Warp Speed?

Posted on May 8, 2009 by woit

To continue with the string theory/movie theme, a commenter just wrote in to tell about some new ideas for using M-theory to create a warp-drive. These are contained in some papers from the past year or two by string theorists … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 19 Comments

Whatever Works

Posted on May 7, 2009 by woit

The latest Woody Allen film, Whatever Works, was shown recently at the Tribeca Film Festival. I missed it there, but it looks like I’ll have to see it when it comes out in theaters later this year. It features the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Witten Away From the Energy Frontier

Posted on May 7, 2009 by woit

Edward Witten has been visiting CERN this past academic year, and it seems that besides continuing to work on things related to geometric Langlands (see his recent talk at Atiyah80), he also has been returning to his roots as a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

LHC On Schedule

Posted on May 7, 2009 by woit

A couple weeks ago I linked here to a draft LHC schedule that had about 3 weeks slippage from the previous schedule, which has beam commissioning starting again on September 21 (week 39). This was due to delays in getting … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 4 Comments

Brane Science

Posted on May 2, 2009 by woit

There’s a nice article in Nature News about the solution to the Kervaire invariant problem mentioned here. It’s an excellent and accurate description of the result and its significance, except for the last paragraph, on “Brane science”, where the author … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 9 Comments