Author Archives: woit

Follow-Ups to two recent postings: Michael Duff has written a letter to New Scientist complaining about their recent editorial Physics’ greatest endeavour is grinding to a halt. Duff begins by claiming: History has shown that rapid confirmation by experiment is … Continue reading →

An assortment of interesting things I’ve run across recently: There’s something called Multiversal Journeys that seems to organize lecture series on theoretical physics, with a special interest in the multiverse (at least to the extent of using it as an … Continue reading →

There’s an article in this week’s Nature by Geoff Brumfiel entitled Outrageous Fortune about the anthropic Landscape debate. The particle physicists quoted are ones whose views are well-known: Susskind, Weinberg, Polchinski, Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena all line up in favor of … Continue reading →

Nikita Nekrasov is giving a very interesting series of talks at the Jerusalem Winter School on the topic of “Introduction to modern covariant superstring theory.” The first of his talks was yesterday and is now on-line. In it he outlined … Continue reading →

John Brockman’s Edge web-site has an annual feature where he asks a wide array of scientists and others how they would answer a hopefully thought-provoking question. Last year the question was What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You … Continue reading →

The 23rd Jerusalem Winter School in Theoretical Physics started yesterday. The topic is “String Theory: Symmetries and Dynamics”, and it is organized by David Gross and Eliezer Rabinovici. Some of the talks are already available on-line, with the quality of … Continue reading →

Eckhard Meinrenken has been teaching a course at Toronto on Lie groups and Clifford algebras, and he has lecture notes available. This is beautiful mathematics and brings together several of my favorite mathematical topics: Clifford algebras, spinors, and representation theory … Continue reading →

Over the last month or so I’ve sent repeated requests to the arXiv to have trackbacks posted for several of my weblog postings. The first of these requests, back in early November, was answered positively by “mjf”, and the trackback … Continue reading →

This week’s issue of Nature has short articles by Atiyah and Witten, both addressing the issue of the current state of string theory. Atiyah’s piece is an interesting review of Lawrence Krauss’s new book Hiding in the Mirror entitled Pulling … Continue reading →