Author Archives: woit

Frank Wilczek has a new Reference Frame piece in this month’s Physics Today. It’s about the question of whether the parameters of our fundamental physical theory are uniquely determined by abstract principles, or “environmental”. He gives two reasons for suspicion … Continue reading →

Someone wrote in to inform me that Alain Connes has made available at his web-site the full text of his long 1994 book Noncommutative Geometry. This is a rather amazing book, in many ways more of a research document than … Continue reading →

Over the last week or so I’ve heard privately from several very different parties with complaints about the comment section here. The general feeling is that it would be more useful and attract more serious contributions if the level of … Continue reading →

The string theory anthropic landscape point of view has now become so widely accepted and entrenched in the particle theory community that various people are making their claims about having had the idea first. The standard first paper that people … Continue reading →

Some rather strange things are going on at the arXiv, especially in the hep-th section: Besides the usual string theory papers, which just get more and more pointless as time goes on, some very weird things have started to appear … Continue reading →

If you just can’t get enough of pictures of mathematicians, head over to the Oberwolfach Photo Collection. This is a huge collection, which I recently ran across when trying to locate something by Graeme Segal. It also includes a photo … Continue reading →

HEPAP today released a new publication designed to convey to the general public excitement about prospects for particle physics in the coming years. It’s entitled Discovering the Quantum Universe, and it has a companion web-site. Both the web-site and the … Continue reading →

The Dibner Institute and Burndy Library at MIT will soon be closing, with the Burndy collection moving to the Huntington Library in California near Caltech. The Dibner Institute is devoted to research in the history of science and technology, and … Continue reading →

Stony Brook announced yesterday that Jim Simons will be making a $25 million dollar donation to the university, focused in the area of mathematics and physics. This is a great deal of money for a math or physics department, and … Continue reading →