Author Archives: woit

The Ottawa Citizen today has an Op-Ed by string cosmologist Jim Cline, headlined The Big Idea That Won’t Die, with a subtitle “The fact that string theory is suddenly under attack only underscores its success as a path to a … Continue reading →

This evening a very interesting paper appeared on the arXiv, entitled Instantons Beyond Topological Theory I by E. Frenkel, Losev and Nekrasov. The authors are studying theories with a topological sector (supersymmetric quantum mechanics and 2d sigma models on a … Continue reading →

Since string theory first became popular in 1984-5, attempts to connect it to particle physics have suffered from various problems. One of the most severe of these goes under the name of “moduli stabilization”. Six dimensional Calabi-Yau manifolds come in … Continue reading →

Bert Schroer has a new version of his paper that was discussed here earlier this year, now with the amended title String theory and the crisis in particle physics (a Samizdat on particle physics). He claims that the version reflects … Continue reading →

Penny Smith, a mathematician at Lehigh University, has posted a paper on the arXiv that purports to solve one of the Clay Foundation Millenium problems, the one about the Navier-Stokes Equation. The paper is here, and Christina Sormani has set … Continue reading →

There’s almost too much to keep track of the last couple days on the string theory controversy front: Burton Richter of SLAC has a Reference Frame piece in the latest Physics Today entitled Theory in particle physics: Theological speculation versus … Continue reading →

Back in April a paper appeared on the arXiv from string theorist Jacques Distler and collaborators that made a rather outrageously overhyped claim to have found a way to “falsify string theory”. The paper was entitled Falsifying String Theory Through … Continue reading →