Author Archives: woit

According to today’s New York Times, “string theory allows for a vast number – 10,500 – of possible ‘worlds’ wth different self-consistent sets of laws and constants.” If 10,500 is “vast”, I wonder what 10500 is? I also wonder how … Continue reading →

Here’s a collection of interesting things I’ve run across recently: A website devoted to Hermann Weyl. The author is a religious sort, but of the good kind. A movie taken at the 1927 Solvay conference. It is on the website … Continue reading →

If you didn’t follow this a couple years ago, you can read John Baez’s detailed description of the Bogdanoff Affair. For more about my dealings with them, see here,, here, and here. If you want to read their stuff, go … Continue reading →

These days some of the strongest criticisms of what is going on in string theory are coming from Lubos Motl’s weblog. His latest post asks what would have happened if currently fashionable ideas about string theory had appeared in the … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin wrote an interesting responses to comments in the comment section of my posting about his Physics Today piece entitled “Why No New Einstein?”. I’m reposting it here. “Dear Peter and colleagues, I am grateful for the attention given … Continue reading →

A couple months ago when I was shocked to realize how close to reality my April Fool’s parody had been, I’d unsuccessfully tried to find out some more information about the Templeton conference at Stanford that Mark Trodden had mentioned … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin has a piece in the latest Physics Today entitled Why no “new Einstein”?. Unfortunately it’s only available to Physics Today subscribers, although Lee tells me he will see if he can put it on-line on his web-page. Tony … Continue reading →

Nature this week has an editorial about Fermilab entitled All or Nothing at Fermilab associated with a news article Fermilab: High-risk physics. The article and editorial are about the fundamental problem facing Fermilab: in a few years the high energy … Continue reading →

I spent most of last week commuting down to Rutgers to participate in a workshop on “Groups and Algebras in M-theory”, organized by Lisa Carbone. Lisa was a student of Hyman Bass’s here at Columbia some years back, and in … Continue reading →

The Pacific Institute for Theoretical Physics, based at UBC in Vancouver, held a Showcase Conference a couple weeks ago, which was supposed to “celebrate the exciting new developments taking place in theoretical physics”. According to the organizers there are lots … Continue reading →