Author Archives: woit

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 →

This week’s Science News has a quite good article about the string theory controversy by Peter Weiss, unfortunately available on-line only to subscribers. The title is “Fit to be Tied: Impatience with string theory boils over”. There’s nothing much in … Continue reading →

Earlier this month there was a workshop on twisted K-theory held at Oberwolfach. Here is a report, also slides from a talk there by Greg Landweber about the Freed-Hopkins-Teleman theorem. Freed is giving a course on the subject this fall, … Continue reading →

The last few weeks have seen the appearance of two papers giving very different proofs of a quite important result in algebraic geometry, resolving a question that had been open for a very long time, and in the process helping … Continue reading →

Yesterday at the KITP Michael Dine gave a very good survey talk on Prospects for a String Theory Phenomenology. It’s pretty much hype free, has a much more realistic point of view than most talks on string phenomenology that I’ve … Continue reading →