Author Archives: woit

Status of Superstring and M-theory

Posted on December 11, 2008 by woit

A write-up by John Schwarz of his Erice lectures from this past summer has now appeared on the arXiv, with the title Status of Superstring and M-theory. In his second lecture, Schwarz provides a good review of the various attempts … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Educational Malpractice

Posted on December 9, 2008 by woit

According to the New York Times, Scarsdale High School has decided to get rid of their Advanced Placement classes, including AP Physics, replacing them with a new curriculum that cost “$40,000 to bring in 25 professors from Harvard, Yale, New … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 55 Comments

Notes on BRST VI: Casimir Operators

Posted on December 3, 2008 by woit

For the case of [tex]G=SU(2)[/tex], it is well-known from the discussion of angular momentum in any quantum mechanics textbook that irreducible representations can be labeled either by j, the highest weight (here, highest eigenvalue of [tex]J_3[/tex] ), or by [tex]j(j+1)[/tex], … Continue reading →

Posted in BRST | 8 Comments

BRST News

Posted on December 2, 2008 by woit

I should finish writing the next installment of the Notes on BRST series soon, but thought I’d post here about two pieces of BRST-related news, concerning the “B” and the “T”. The “T” in BRST is I.V. Tyutin, whose Lebedev … Continue reading →

Posted in BRST | 4 Comments

From Quarks to Strings

Posted on December 2, 2008 by woit

There’s a new preprint on the arXiv from Polyakov, entitled From Quarks to Strings, in which he tells the story of his involvement with string theory over the years. He begins: In the sixties I was not much interested in … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Latest From the LHC

Posted on November 25, 2008 by woit

A talk at CERN today by Jorg Wenninger gives an update on the problems at Sector 34 and more information about what the prospects are for restarting the machine next year. The cause of the accident has been identified as … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 18 Comments

The Landscape at Princeton

Posted on November 24, 2008 by woit

The Princeton Center for Theoretical Science has been having a mini-symposium on the string theory Landscape, and as part of this today hosted a “panel discussion” on the topic. It turns out that there’s not a lot of support for … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 21 Comments

Notes on BRST V: Highest Weight Theory

Posted on November 23, 2008 by woit

In the last posting we discussed the Lie algebra cohomology [tex]H^*(\mathfrak g, V)[/tex] for [tex]\mathfrak g[/tex] a semi-simple Lie algebra. Because the invariants functor is exact here, this tells us nothing about the structure of irreducible representations in this case. … Continue reading →

Posted in BRST | 4 Comments

The Map of My Life

Posted on November 22, 2008 by woit

Springer has just published an autobiography of Goro Shimura, entitled The Map of My Life. Shimura’s specialty is the arithmetic theory of modular forms, and he’s responsible for a crucial construction generalizing the modular curve, now known as a “Shimura … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 25 Comments

Shouldn’t Something Be Done?

Posted on November 19, 2008 by woit

The sheer awfulness of last night’s History Channel program on physics is hard to exaggerate. Here’s some of what Clifford Johnson (one of the participants in the program) wrote on his blog while watching it: Oh, right… I remember “there … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 39 Comments