Author Archives: woit

You know things are getting strange when Esquire magazine starts running an article on the current state of particle theory. As you might expect, their take on this is rather odd. It centers around Nima Arkani-Hamed and begins with: For … Continue reading →

For some insight into the difficulties associated with being an untenured professor and trying to get an NSF grant in astronomy, see this post (and comments) by Rob Knop. For those innocent of the ways of academia, there’s a post … Continue reading →

Starting tomorrow there’s a workshop in London entitled M-theory in the City, in some sense celebrating the 11th birthday of M-theory. There will be a reception on Thursday evening, and the organizers of the workshop are noting that: Recently there … Continue reading →

Yesterday at the KITP in Santa Barbara, George Johnson gave a second talk and led a discussion on the subject of the “String Wars”. The rather remarkable first session was discussed here, here and here. This time people were much … Continue reading →

This week in Honolulu there’s a major particle physics conference going on, a joint meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields of the APS, and the Japanese Physical Society, called the Joint Meeting of Pacific Region Particle Physics Communities. … Continue reading →

From the “First Superstring Revolution” on, there have always been skeptics, even though they often were not very vocal. Perhaps the most well-known piece of such criticism was Paul Ginsparg and Sheldon Glashow’s Desperately Seeking Superstrings, which appeared in the … Continue reading →

The main argument generally given for working on string theory is that it’s the only way to get a finite theory of quantum gravity. One often hears claims that gravity can’t be quantized using QFT, that string theory is needed … Continue reading →

Seed has a new article out by Stephen Ornes, called The Proof is in the Blogging, about the way the story of Penny Smith’s solution to the Navier-Stokes problem played out here. I’m quite fond of the photo included in … Continue reading →