Author Archives: woit

Last weekend Princeton held a Special Symposium in honor of Alexander Polyakov’s 60th birthday. Witten talked about his recent work on Langlands duality. He’ll also be speaking about this next week at Rutgers and December 1 and 2 up in … Continue reading →

A wonderful long-promised paper by Dan Freed, Mike Hopkins and Constantin Teleman entitled Loop Groups and Twisted K-theory II has just appeared. They have advertised it in the past under various names such as “K-theory, Loop Groups and Dirac Families”, … Continue reading →

John Baez has a very interesting new paper on the arXiv this evening entitled Calabi-Yau Manifolds and the Standard Model. In it he points out that the standard model gauge group (which he carefully defines as SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)/N, where N is … Continue reading →

Lawrence Krauss has an essay in today’s New York Times about science, religion and string theory, covering much the same material discussed here in a recent posting. There are postings about this from Mark Trodden at Cosmic Variance and Lubos … Continue reading →

As a commenter here noted last night, and other commenters have discussed in the last posting, Steven Weinberg has just put on the arXiv an article entitled Living in the Multiverse. In it, he correctly points out that theoretical physics … Continue reading →

There’s a new paper out tonight by Nikita Nekrasov entitled Lectures on curved beta-gamma system, pure spinors, and anomalies. Motivated by questions about the covariant superstring quantization method being studied in recent years by Berkovits, Nekrasov considers a sigma model … Continue reading →

Last week the Perimeter Institute ran a Workshop on Cosmological Frontiers in Fundamental Physics and someone wrote in to point out to me that the talks are now available on-line. Much of the workshop was about mainstream cosmology, especially the … Continue reading →

The latest Cosmic Log column on msnbc.com concerns Lawrence Krauss’s new book Hiding in the Mirror and the author asked Krauss a question I’m expecting that physicists will be hearing more and more often as time goes on: “Why is … Continue reading →

Sir Michael Atiyah is here in the United States this month. Evidently he was at the Institute in Princeton last week during the Deligne conference, talking to Witten. Last Friday he gave a public talk at an AMS conference at … Continue reading →

There have been several recent interesting talks at the KITP in Santa Barbara as part of their program this semester on Mathematical Structures in String Theory. Last week Greg Moore gave a beautiful talk on Mathematical Aspects of Fluxes. It’s … Continue reading →