Author Archives: woit

Last Friday night when I was in Rome I received e-mails in quick succession from two science journalists asking what I thought about a new mathematical result, the “mapping of E8” that was going to be announced at a press … Continue reading →

I’ve been traveling in Italy for the past ten days, and gave talks in Rome and Pisa, on the topic “Is String Theory Testable?”. The slides from my talks are here (I’ll fix a few minor things about them in … Continue reading →

John Horgan keeps moving his blogging activities to different locations, the latest one is here. For a truly sad and distressing story about what has happened to Billy Cottrell (who was mentioned snarkily by me long ago here), see this … Continue reading →

There’s a short memoir out this evening on the arXiv by Peter Freund about the algebraist Irving Kaplansky, universally known as “Kap”, who died last year at the age of 89. Freund worked with Kaplansky at Chicago during the mid-seventies … Continue reading →

Many string theorists seem to have decided to react to the criticisms of string theory that have recently been getting a lot of attention by going to the press with claims to have experimental tests of string theory that can … Continue reading →

The March issue of Physics Today is now available. It contains a piece by Steven Weinberg based on a banquet talk he gave to a group of postdocs. He describes his own memories of his time as a postdoc, writing … Continue reading →

There’s an article in this week’s Science magazine by Adrian Cho entitled Dreams Collide With Reality for International Experiment. It’s about DOE Undersecretary Orbach’s warning to HEPAP (mentioned here) that current plans were too optimistic about the time-scale for the … Continue reading →

There’s a new issue of Symmetry magazine out. It is a bimonthly magazine about particle physics put out by SLAC and Fermilab, and often has interesting and informative articles. But, even though I generally read the whole thing when it … Continue reading →

The Princeton Physics department colloquium on “New Neutrino Oscillation Results from the MiniBooNE Experiment” scheduled for this Thursday has been canceled. I wonder what is going on with that. Have they not opened the box yet on their result, or … Continue reading →

Over at Dynamics of Cats, Steinn Sigurdsson has a posting on Yarn Theory, to some extent a review of Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics. Steinn is an astrophysicist, but started out life as a string theorist before getting disillusioned … Continue reading →