Author Archives: woit

Last night a new paper by Lenny Susskind appeared on the arXiv, carrying the title The Census Taker’s Hat. It seems that Lubos Motl stayed up much of the night reading it, with a long posting on the subject appearing … Continue reading →

I spent Thursday down in Princeton attending talks at the second day of a symposium on mathematics, quantum mechanics and the legacy of John von Neumann, organized by Hans Halvorson of the Department of Philosophy. A blurb about the symposium … Continue reading →

Things are not going well for string theory on the public relations front. Someone just pointed me to the poll at Wired magazine they call String Theory Smackdown, where the side arguing for string theory is losing the voting by … Continue reading →

The latest issue of the Onion has some HEP-related coverage. It includes a nifty graphic, and has this inspirational message from one of our congress-people “Now, I’m no science major, but if I’m being told by a group of people … Continue reading →

Various things of interest, ordered in terms of increasing mathematical content: This week Fermilab has hosted a P5 meeting and an annual program review. At the P5 meeting, Fermilab director Pier Oddone made the case for planning to keep running … Continue reading →

This is not a very timely posting, since my readers let me down by not telling me about this when it came out. Last month the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Lee Gomes about a workshop on the … Continue reading →

The Edge web-site has something new up they call Einstein: An Edge Symposium (thanks to commenter Hendrik for pointing this out). It’s an exchange between Walter Isaacson, Paul Steinhardt and Brian Greene, nominally about Einstein, but ending up turning into … Continue reading →

Yesterday a new web-site was launched by the DOE and NSF, called US/LHC, which will be devoted to the role of the US in the LHC project. Besides news and descriptions of the science and the experiments, it will also … Continue reading →

Despite my abusive treatment of his article Stringscape here recently, Matthew Chalmers was kind enough to send me a copy of the September issue of Physics World, which contains three shorter pieces about string theory (available on-line only to subscribers). … Continue reading →

It seems that if you’re a Fields Medalist, you now have to have a blog. The latest of these is a new blog from Timothy Gowers. His blog will also function as a blog for the upcoming Princeton Companion to … Continue reading →