Author Archives: woit

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 →

A couple weeks ago I generated a list of the theoretical physics papers that were most heavily cited during 2006, according to the SLAC database, and discussed it here. Today the people at SLAC put out their own lists for … Continue reading →

Discover Magazine has just announced a competition, calling on people to submit videos to them that “clearly explain perhaps the most baffling idea in the history of the world: string theory”. The challenge is called String Theory in Two Minutes … Continue reading →

Too much going on, hard to keep up with all the things that seem worth mentioning. Here are some quick ones: There was a meeting on Geometric Langlands involving mathematicians and physicists last week at the Schrodinger Institute in Vienna. … Continue reading →

Later this week there will be a mini-workshop at City College organized by some of the CUNY particle theorists, on the topic of Yang-Mills Theories: nonperturbative aspects. The schedule of talks is here, I’m planning on attending some of them. … Continue reading →