Author Archives: woit

Joe Lykken just finished giving a series of talks at the SLAC summer school, now entitled “String Theory for Physicists”. This was changed from the original title, “String Theory for Dummies” (still on the poster). Presumably somebody realized that the … Continue reading →

Since I accidentally deleted a post, so had to spend some time fixing things, I decided to go ahead with a long-planned project to try and change around the software here. The old Movable Type software is gone, replaced by … Continue reading →

Lots of conferences are going on right around now, here’s some of them, many with on-line versions of the talks. Lattice 2005 in Dublin, with blogging from Matthew Nobes. SUSY 2005 at Durham. See some comments by Clifford Johnson. There … Continue reading →

This week I’m in Seattle, among other things attending a Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry sponsored by the AMS. This is the latest in a series of large summer conferences on algebraic geometry that have taken place about every ten … Continue reading →

Several months ago Erick Weinberg had told me that his recollections of the story of the calculation of the Yang-Mills beta function were different than David Politzer’s. Erick actually did independently do the beta function calculation (for the case with … Continue reading →

Over at the new Cosmic Variance blog, Sean Carroll has posted a defense of string theory against what he sees as disdain, resentment and disparaging remarks from other physicists, a defense he entitles Two Cheers for String Theory. I’ve written … Continue reading →

It has been almost exactly a year since Hawking gave a talk in Dublin claiming to have found a resolution of the black hole information paradox. Tonight a preprint giving some details of his argument has appeared. I’ll leave to … Continue reading →

Sean Carroll, of Preposterous Universe, has joined forces with Mark Trodden (of Orange Quark), and new bloggers SLAC particle phenomenologist JoAnne Hewett, USC string/brane theorist Clifford Johnson, and Chicago cosmologist Risa Wechsler. They’ll be collaborating on a new weblog entitled … Continue reading →

A colleague informs me that the latest New York Review of Books contains a letter from one of the most well-known mathematicians in the U.S.