Author Archives: woit

More From Polchinski

Posted on January 28, 2016 by woit

Joe Polchinski has a rather odd preprint on hep-th, more of a blog posting than a paper, summing up his views on string theory and the multiverse. This is a revised version, wisely dropping a really unfortunate section. The material … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | Comments Off on More From Polchinski

Hitler doesn’t get a postdoc in High Energy Theory

Posted on January 23, 2016 by woit

I recognize that this is a genre that is a bit tired, and arguably in poor taste, but the commentary on the HEP theory postdoc job market in the video Hitler doesn’t get a postdoc in High Energy Theory is … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

Back at Work

Posted on January 21, 2016 by woit

It’s been a while since the last posting here, mostly because I’ve been away on vacation, but also because I haven’t seen anything that newsworthy. But, since I’m back in the office and there have been complaints, here are a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on January 6, 2016 by woit

Some short items on a wide variety of topics: The Hawking/Perry/Strominger paper on a new idea about the black hole information paradox (see here for an early discussion) based on BMS supertranslation symmetries has now appeared on the arXiv. I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

End of Year Links

Posted on December 30, 2015 by woit

A collection of links to round out the year: The Seminaire Bourbaki talks this January look unusually interesting. Luckily I’ll be in Paris at that time. For an end of year present, Jacob Lurie has posted a version of his … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Why String Theory?

Posted on December 25, 2015 by woit

I recently got a copy of Joseph Conlon’s new book Why String Theory? and was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s quite good. Conlon is a lively, entertaining writer, generally sensible about the scientific issues involved, and I think does … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 43 Comments

Updates

Posted on December 16, 2015 by woit

Some new items mostly updating older ones: Natalie Wolchover has a very good article at Quanta, entitled A Fight for the Soul of Science, reporting on the recent Munich conference discussed here. David Gross sounds a little bit like John … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 70 Comments

Run 2 and SUSY

Posted on December 15, 2015 by woit

What surprised me most about today’s Run 2 results (see here) was that CMS and ATLAS were able to already significantly push up limits on superpartner masses, especially the gluino mass. Limits on the gluino mass went from 1.3-1.4 TeV … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Uncategorized | 16 Comments

LHC Run 2 First Results

Posted on December 14, 2015 by woit

First results using the full data from Run 2 at 13 TeV will be presented tomorrow at CERN at 15:00 Geneva time, with a live webcast available here. For some relevant commentary, see Tommaso Dorigo and Matt Strassler. Among relatively … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 13 Comments

White Smoke Over Oxford?

Posted on December 10, 2015 by woit

I’ve stolen the title of this posting from Michael Harris, see his posting for a discussion of the same topic. A big topic of discussion among mathematicians this week is the ongoing workshop at Oxford devoted to Mochizuki’s claimed proof … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture | 37 Comments