Author Archives: woit

At the big AAAS conference held in San Francisco the past few days there was a session on “A New Frontier in Particle Physics”, about the LHC and the promise of physics at the TeV scale. Burton Richter’s talk there … Continue reading →

Terry Tao’s article What is Good Mathematics?, written for the Bulletin of the AMS, is now available at the arXiv. There’s a new article also on the arXiv by Zvi Bern et al. explicitly constructing the 3-loop 4-point amplitude of … Continue reading →

The March issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. Excellent summaries of the mathematical work of the 2006 Fields medalists and interviews with three of them (everybody except Perelman). By the way, does anyone know if the 2006 … Continue reading →

Instead of doing the work I had planned, I spent much of today having a very enjoyable time reading the mystery novel The Newtonian Legacy by particle theorist Nick Evans. A copy is available at his web-site here, and there’s … Continue reading →

The “Reference Design Report” for the ILC was released today, and here’s a presentation about this from Barry Barish, the director of the ILC GDE (Global Design Effort). The most closely held numbers in the report have been the cost … Continue reading →

Alexey Petrov, a particle theorist at Wayne State University, has a blog worth following called Symmetry Factor. He has news about the 2008 budget request for HEP at the DOE, which according to him includes a 12.7% increase in the … Continue reading →

John Baez has a new issue of This Week’s Finds. He has a lot of interesting things to say about Euler characteristics and how you measure sizes in a category. Among many things I learned from Graeme Segal when he … Continue reading →

Just to show that New Scientist doesn’t always get it wrong, there’s an unusually good article in this week’s issue by Davide Castelvecchi about prospects for new discoveries at the LHC. Besides the usual story, he concentrates on the question … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics will be out soon in the UK, available February 22 according to Amazon.uk. This month’s Physics World has a very good review of the book by Michael Riordan, under the title Stringing physics along. … Continue reading →

The write-up of Larry McLerran’s summary talk at Quark Matter 2006 has now appeared. This talk created a bit of a stir since McLerran was rather critical of the way string theorists have been overhyping the application of string theory … Continue reading →