Author Archives: woit

Bryce DeWitt on Quantum Gravity and String Theory

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

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Quick Links

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

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Do We Need to Change the Definition of Science?

Media hype about how the LHC is going to test string theory continues: see Will String Theory Be Proven and here: String theory has come under attack because some say it can never be tested; the strings are supposed to … Continue reading

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 30 Comments

Witten on Dark Energy

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

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“So what will you do if string theory is wrong?”

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

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Anonymity at Cosmic Variance

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

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Creutz On Rooting

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

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This and That

The interactions.org web-site has a new useful feature, Interactions Blog Watch, which aggregates links to recent physics-related blog entries. One of the older such aggregators I know of is Mixed States, but it seems to have stopped on March 15. … Continue reading

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Experimentalists 1, Theorists 0

At Fermilab the Tevatron is producing record amounts of luminosity, see here for a story about a celebration of this. Things also appear to be going well at the LHC, as the cooldown remains on schedule, and only a tolerable … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 140 Comments

Multimedia and the Journal of Number Theory

I recently heard from David Goss, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Number Theory, that the journal is planning on introducing video abstracts for papers that they publish. Here’s his e-mail explaining this: Dear Colleagues: By now I believe that all … Continue reading

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