Author Archives: woit

The Wormhole Publicity Stunt

Posted on December 3, 2022 by woit

The best way to understand the “physicists create wormholes in the lab” nonsense of the past few days is as a publicity stunt (I should credit Andreas Karch for the idea to describe things this way), one that went too … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 59 Comments

Igor Krichever 1950-2022

Posted on December 1, 2022 by woit

I just heard the sad news that Igor Krichever passed away this morning at the age of 72. Igor was a great scholar, a wise man, and a wonderful human being. He will be sorely missed by his colleagues at … Continue reading →

Posted in Obituaries | 2 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on November 30, 2022 by woit

This morning Quanta Magazine informs us that Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer, promoting the article on Twitter with BREAKING: Physicists have built a wormhole and successfully sent information from one end to the other and Physicists have … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 37 Comments

Comments on AdS/CFT

Posted on November 30, 2022 by woit

This is something I wrote back in June, for context see the next posting. First of all, there’s the following, which is not strictly scientific, but very relevant to how one decides to evaluate progress in a subject. The Maldacena … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

The Mystery of Spin

Posted on November 22, 2022 by woit

Scientific American has a new article today about the supposedly mysterious fact that electrons have “spin” even though they aren’t classical spinning material objects. The article doesn’t link to it, but it appears that it is discussing this paper by … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Mechanics | 45 Comments

Math Job Rumors

Posted on November 17, 2022 by woit

I noticed yesterday a website named Math Job Rumors that has been operating for a couple months. No idea what the story behind it is other than that it’s clearly a descendant of Economics Job Market Rumors, which had some … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Career Prospects for HEP-TH Students

Posted on November 14, 2022 by woit

Guangyu Xu, a student just finishing his Ph.D. at the Centre for Particle Physics at Durham University, recently sent me a public letter he wrote, explaining the story of his job search, in hopes that it might be useful to … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

No Landau-Siegel zeros?

Posted on November 10, 2022 by woit

A couple weeks ago rumors were circulating that Yitang Zhang was claiming a proof of a longstanding open conjecture in number theory, the “no Landau-Siegel zeros” conjecture. Such a proof would be a very major new result. Zhang was a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Physical Mathematics c. 2022

Posted on November 9, 2022 by woit

The arXiv today has a very comprehensive survey of a conventional point of view on where “Physical Mathematics” is in 2022 and where it is going, written by a group of six authors. “Physical Mathematics” is a term popularized by … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on October 31, 2022 by woit

CERN on Wednesday is hosting a colloquium talk by Joseph Lykken, who supposedly will discuss Prospects for experimental quantum gravity. There’s by now a long tradition of string theorists dealing with criticism that their research program is inherently immune from … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 11 Comments