Author Archives: woit

Will Physicists Find God?

Posted on March 25, 2008 by woit

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

Posted on March 15, 2008 by woit

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

Posted on March 13, 2008 by woit

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

Posted on March 12, 2008 by woit

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

Posted on March 9, 2008 by woit

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

Posted on March 9, 2008 by woit

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

Posted on March 9, 2008 by woit

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

Fleinhardt Hits a Roadblock

Posted on February 28, 2008 by woit

Larry Fleinhardt, the fictional Caltech string theorist in the TV show Numb3rs, has decided to give up on string theory for now and become a phenomenologist. According to the show’s co-writer Nick Falacci: Like real-life physicists, Fleinhardt hit a roadblock … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

New LHC Schedule

Posted on February 27, 2008 by woit

This week is a “CMS week” at CERN, and talks are available here. The plenary talk discussing the LHC status has: If all goes well the machine should be cold by 1 June, and protons could be injected by mid-June. … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | Comments Off on New LHC Schedule

Rock Guitars Could Hold Secret to Universe

Posted on February 27, 2008 by woit

From the Bolton News: ROCK guitars could hold the key to the origins of the universe, hundreds of young science pupils were told. The Institute of Physics held a lecture in Bolton entitled “Rock in 11 dimensions: where physics and … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 23 Comments