Author Archives: woit

Quick Links

Posted on September 10, 2020 by woit

A few quick links: I was sorry to hear of the recent death of Vaughan Jones. A few things about his life and work have started to appear, see here, here and here. For a wonderful in-depth article about the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Fall Quantum Mechanics Class

Posted on September 7, 2020 by woit

I’ll be teaching a course on quantum mechanics this year here at Columbia, from a point of view aimed somewhat at mathematicians, emphasizing the role of Lie groups and their representations. For more details, the course webpage is here. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Mechanics | 19 Comments

AMS Open Math Notes

Posted on September 6, 2020 by woit

The AMS for the last few years has had a valuable project called AMS Open Math Notes, a site to gather and make available course notes for math classes, documents of the sort that people sometimes make available on their … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Quantum Reality

Posted on September 2, 2020 by woit

Jim Baggott’s new book, Quantum Reality, is now out here in US, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the issues surrounding the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Starting next week I’ll be teaching a course on quantum mechanics … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 37 Comments

Funding Priorities

Posted on August 26, 2020 by woit

The research that gets done in any field of science is heavily influenced by the priorities set by those who fund the research. For science in the US in general, and the field of theoretical physics in particular, recent years … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 36 Comments

Guys and Their Theories of Everything

Posted on August 21, 2020 by woit

I’m a big fan of Sabine Hossenfelder’s music videos, the latest of which, Theories of Everything, has recently appeared. I also agree with much of the discussion of this at her latest blog posting where Steven Evans writes nobody wants … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Twistors and the Standard Model

Posted on August 11, 2020 by woit

For the past few months I’ve been working on writing up some ideas I’m quite excited about, and the pandemic has helped move things along by removing distractions and forcing me to mostly stay home. There’s now something written that … Continue reading →

Posted in Euclidean Twistor Unification | 15 Comments

Quantization and Dirac Cohomology

Posted on August 7, 2020 by woit

For many years I’ve been fascinated by the topic of “Dirac cohomology” and its possible relations to various questions about quantization and quantum field theory. At first I was mainly trying to understand the relation to BRST, and wrote some … Continue reading →

Posted in BRST | Comments Off on Quantization and Dirac Cohomology

(Imaginary) Time Asymmetry

Posted on August 6, 2020 by woit

When people write down a list of axioms for quantum mechanics, they typically neglect to include a crucial one: positivity (or more generally, boundedness below) of the energy. This is equivalent to saying that something very different happens when you … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Mechanics | 22 Comments

Yesterday’s Hype

Posted on August 1, 2020 by woit

Every summer CERN runs a summer student programme, designed to bring in a group of students to participate in scientific activities at CERN and provide lectures for them about the basics and latest state of the field of high energy … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 28 Comments