Author Archives: woit

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

The String Theory Backlash

Posted on June 19, 2006 by woit

Over at Cosmic Variance Sean Carroll has a posting about The String Theory Backlash. Probably best if anyone who wants to discuss it do so over there, so I’ll turn off comments here. Update: More about this here. Update: The … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | Comments Off on The String Theory Backlash

Strings 2006

Posted on June 18, 2006 by woit

Strings 2006 is about to get underway in Beijing, at a hotel next to Tiananmen Square, with public talks by David Gross, Andy Strominger and Stephen Hawking. Jonathan Shock reports that an agreement was formally signed today creating the KITPC, … Continue reading →

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 35 Comments

Richter Talk at SUSY06

Posted on June 17, 2006 by woit

Burton Richter’s talk at the panel on “Naturalness” at SUSY06 is now on-line. Richter blasted his three theoretical colleagues on the panel (two of whom are his colleagues at Stanford) in forceful terms as no longer doing science: … I … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

More Landscape, and Peer Review

Posted on June 16, 2006 by woit

The anthropic string theory landscape seems to be having ever greater success in taking over fundamental physics and turning it into pseudo-science. It’s being promoted by no less than 2008 presidential candidate Wesley Clark, the following is from a transcript … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 77 Comments

Censored Comments From the Reference Frame

Posted on June 15, 2006 by woit

Since many people have been posting off-topic comments here that were censored over at Lubos Motl’s Reference Frame, I’m creating a separate posting so that there will be an appropriate place for these. Also, if you want to try and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 94 Comments

The Scientific Curmudgeon

Posted on June 15, 2006 by woit

John Horgan has an excellent new blog that he has recently started up, called The Scientific Curmudgeon. Horgan may be best known for his provocative 1996 book The End of Science, which was one of the first books for the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments