Author Archives: woit

Various and Sundry

Posted on September 8, 2016 by woit

A few unrelated items: Maybe Multiverse Mania in the popular press is fading. The Atlantic has The Multiverse Idea is Rotting Culture, where the author points out In 2014, the New Scientist published an article called “Multiverse Me,” revealing that … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

Weapons of Math Destruction

Posted on September 6, 2016 by woit

Cathy O’Neil’s important new book Weapons of Math Destruction, is out today, and if you’re at all interested in the social significance of how mathematics is now being used, you should go out and get a copy. She has been … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 30 Comments

Templeton News

Posted on September 1, 2016 by woit

Looking at my list of items to blog about, I see most of them have some relation to the Templeton Foundation, so this will be a blog post just about those. To get some idea of the scale of Templeton’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Not Ever Wrong

Posted on August 22, 2016 by woit

The “SUSY Bet” event in Copenhagen took place today, with video available for a while at this site. It appears to be gone for the moment, will put up a better link if it becomes available. An expensive bottle of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 106 Comments

Various News

Posted on August 19, 2016 by woit

Before turning to other topics, congratulations to my Columbia colleague Wei Zhang, who was awarded the Gold Medal at the recent ICCM in Beijing. On the HEP physics front, some news is: On Monday at 1:30pm Danish time, at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

The Nightmare Scenario

Posted on August 10, 2016 by woit

Now back from a short vacation, and there seems to have been a lot happening on the debate over fundamental physics front. From the experimentalists, news that the Standard Model continues to resist falsification: At ICHEP, as expected, new data … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 42 Comments

HEP Physics News

Posted on July 31, 2016 by woit

ICHEP 2016 starts in Chicago this week. Talks about the new diphoton results are scheduled for 9am (Chicago time) Friday. There will also be talks later in the day at CERN (5pm Geneva time), scheduled as part of this summer’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Strings 2XXX, Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Monumental Proof to Torment Mathematicians for Years to Come

Posted on July 28, 2016 by woit

Davide Castelvecchi at Nature has talked to some of the mathematicians at the recent Kyoto workshop on Mochizuki’s proposed proof of the abc conjecture, and written up a summary under the appropriate title Monumental proof to torment mathematicians for years … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture | 46 Comments

Quantum Theory and Representation Theory, the Book

Posted on July 26, 2016 by woit

For the last few years most of my time has been spent working on writing a textbook, with the current title Quantum Theory, Groups and Representations: An Introduction. The book is based on a year-long course that I’ve taught twice, … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Theory: The Book | 13 Comments

WIMPs on Death Row

Posted on July 21, 2016 by woit

One of the main arguments given for the idea of supersymmetric extensions of the standard model has been what SUSY enthusiasts call the “WIMP Miracle” (WIMP=Weakly Interacting Massive Particle). This is the claim that such SUSY models include a stable … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 52 Comments