Author Archives: woit

Polchinski Review at American Scientist and Cosmic Variance

This month’s American Scientist has a review entitled All Strung Out? of The Trouble With Physics and Not Even Wrong by prominent string theorist Joe Polchinski, and he has posted a slightly edited version of the review with some explanatory … Continue reading

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 16 Comments

Lots of Links

Various things that I’ve run across recently that seem worth mentioning: The proceedings of the big yearly lattice gauge theory conference that was mentioned here, Lattice 2006, are now available here. The New York Times today in its Science Times … Continue reading

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Two Reviews

Two reviews by physicists of my book and Lee Smolin’s have recently appeared. The first is by David Lindley in the Wilson Quarterly. Lindley has written some excellent popular books about physics, including one about quantum mechanics entitled Where Does … Continue reading

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 47 Comments

Media and Other News

There’s filming going on outside my office window today, right at the entrance to the Columbia Mathematics building. The film is Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, with a screenplay based on the David Foster Wallace book of the same name. … Continue reading

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Langlands on Langlands

In a forthcoming issue of the AMS Bulletin, there will be a long review by Robert Langlands of the book p-adic Automorphic Forms on Shimura Varieties by Haruzo Hida. The book itself is on a very technical subject, but the … Continue reading

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Esquire On The State of Particle Theory

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

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More On Geometric Langlands (a Grand Unified Theory of Math?)

After mentioning in the last posting that Witten is giving talks in Berkeley and Cambridge this week, I found out about various recent developments in Geometric Langlands, some of which Witten presumably will be talking about. Edward Frenkel has put … Continue reading

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More Links

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

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Links

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

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String Wars, Part Deux

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

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