Author Archives: woit

Krauss on Boltzmann Brains

Lawrence Krauss has a piece this week in New Scientist about the latest hot topic in theoretical physics, Boltzmann brains. It’s entitled String Theory’s Latest Folly, and starts off: THOMAS AQUINAS may never have actually wondered how many angels can … Continue reading

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 18 Comments

Off-topic

I usually try hard to avoid writing here about anything not directly related to mathematics and physics, but on rare occasions I can’t resist. Many readers may want to skip this posting as unserious, but maybe some will find it … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

2008 Abel Prize

The winner of this year’s Abel prize, a prize of over $1 million set up back in 2001 to provide an equivalent of a Nobel prize in mathematics, is… Actually, I have no idea. If you know who it is, … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

Will Physicists Find God?

Today’s second most viewed article in Newsweek is an interview with Steven Weinberg about what we’ll learn at the LHC. Unfortunately it almost immediately turns into a discussion about religion and is linked to on the Newsweek site as Will … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 40 Comments

Media Events in Paris

Tomorrow I’ll be in Las Vegas, on my way to southern Utah, so will miss a couple of math-physics media events taking place in Paris. At 2pm on Sunday, Lubos Motl will be appearing at the France Television booth at … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 37 Comments

Electric-Magnetic Duality on a Half-Space

The past few weeks I’ve often been going down to the IAS in Princeton on Thursdays to hear talks given as part of the special program there this semester in mathematics. These talks included a series of five talks by … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

2008 Templeton Prize

The 2008 Templeton Prize was announced today. It goes to Michael Heller, a Polish cosmologist, philosopher and Catholic priest, for “sharply focused and strikingly original concepts on the origin and cause of the universe.” The full name of the Templeton … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

The Landscape and the Emperor’s New Clothes

The String Vacuum Project, described as “a large, multi-institution, interdisciplinary collaboration”, that has been established over the last few years, is having its Kick-Off Meeting next month at the University of Arizona. This group had submitted grant proposals to the … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 70 Comments

HEP and Politics News

In perhaps the most important development for the future of HEP in the US in quite a while, yesterday Bill Foster, an HEP experimentalist who worked on CDF and the Recycler at Fermilab, won a race to fill the congressional … Continue reading

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 2 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Today’s Newsday has a long article by Michael Guillen about the significance of the new Simons Center at Stony Brook. Guillen is a theoretical physicist who was the science editor at ABC-TV for fourteen years, and now is the host … Continue reading

Posted in This Week's Hype | 5 Comments