Author Archives: woit

Various Weirdness

Posted on July 5, 2006 by woit

Must be something in the air, lots of weird things going on recently: My book has been officially non-endorsed by the people at Axes & Alleys. I finally realized why Lubos was carrying on about how if any errors in … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book, Uncategorized | 29 Comments

Many Worlds In One

Posted on July 2, 2006 by woit

Alex Vilenkin has a new popular book out about cosmology, entitled Many Worlds In One. It’s mainly about the extremely speculative end of cosmology, and much of it is devoted to explaining the author’s ideas on eternal inflation, creating the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 37 Comments

Some Links

Posted on June 29, 2006 by woit

The Cao-Zhu paper at the Asian Journal of Mathematics that is supposed to have a complete proof of the Poincare and geometrization conjectures is still not available, but the introduction to the paper has been posted there. If you’re not … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Zwiebach Letter to the WSJ

Posted on June 29, 2006 by woit

Over at his web-site, Lubos has posted a letter to the Wall Street Journal from Barton Zwiebach. The letter seriously misrepresents the current state of string theory in several ways: string theory is an extraordinarily precise and rigorous framework where … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 59 Comments

Responses To WSJ Article

Posted on June 27, 2006 by woit

The lack of any serious (Lubos doesn’t count) response to my book from string theorists since its appearance in the UK a month or so ago has begun to surprise me a bit. I was also suprised at how weak … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 73 Comments

Talks at Strings 2006 Now Available

Posted on June 26, 2006 by woit

Slides from the talks at Strings 2006 are now available. I’ve spent a little while looking through them today, and am sorry I don’t have time to say much about them. Lots of more or less the same thing as … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Yarn Theory

Posted on June 25, 2006 by woit

A couple people wrote in this morning to tell me about today’s Doonesbury, which features slacker Zipper Harris (who has a blog) trying to impress a woman he last saw in sophomore year of college. He’s still undecided about his … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

NEW in the WSJ

Posted on June 23, 2006 by woit

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by Sharon Begley entitled Has String Theory Tied Up Better Ideas In Field of Physics? (sorry, subscription required for on-line version). The summary of the article goes After two decades in which string … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 26 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on June 22, 2006 by woit

The Economist has an article this week entitled To catch a gravitational wave. It’s about the proposed LISA satellite experiment designed to measure gravitational waves, with a much greater sensitivity than LIGO. According to the article, what would you guess … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

LHC News

Posted on June 20, 2006 by woit

JoAnne Hewett at Cosmic Variance reports that the latest LHC commissioning plan will not involve collisions at 14 TeV until 2008, with earliest physics run in April 2008. First collisions will be in November 2007, but at Tevatron energies. Until … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments