Author Archives: woit

For the last 15 years the New York City subway has featured “Poetry in Motion”, which places extracts of poetry in subway cars. Starting next month this program will be expanded, joined by Train of Thought, which will add “short … Continue reading →

Last night a preprint appeared on the arXiv from beyond the grave, an undated manuscript entitled Quantum Gravity, Yesterday and Today, found without any indication of its purpose in the files of Bryce DeWitt, who passed away in 2004. DeWitt … Continue reading →

The speakers for Strings 2008 have been announced. One anomaly is that someone from the LQG camp has finally been invited, Carlo Rovelli. Another anomaly is that Witten won’t be speaking. Remember last November’s “unmistakable imprint of another universe” which … Continue reading →

Commenter Shantanu pointed to a web-site with talks available on-line from a symposium about Dark Energy now going on at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Yesterday Witten gave a talk entitled “Models of Dark Energy”, where he lays out very … Continue reading →

In a new preprint of an article entitled “So what will you do if string theory is wrong?”, to appear in the American Journal of Physics, string theorist Moataz Emam gives a striking answer to the question of the title. … Continue reading →

Over at Cosmic Variance, anonymous comments personally attacking me have been posted recently by someone who identifies themselves only as “string theorist”. I’ve complained to Sean Carroll and his colleagues about their policy of allowing the comment section of their … Continue reading →

Michael Creutz has a remarkable new preprint out this evening, entitled The Saga of Rooted Staggered Quarks. It explains what has been going on in a rather bitter controversy within the lattice gauge theory community over the last few years. … Continue reading →