Author Archives: woit

BICEP2 News

Posted on May 13, 2014 by woit

Recall that this past March results from BICEP2 were announced, claiming a greater than 5 sigma detection of a primordial B-mode signal in the CMB polarization. This result received a huge amount of world-wide attention (and see some commentary here). … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Quillen Notebooks

Posted on May 6, 2014 by woit

Daniel Quillen, one of the greatest mathematicians of the latter part of the twentieth century, passed away in 2011 after suffering from Alzheimer’s. For an appreciation of his work and an explanation of its significance, a good place to start … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on April 28, 2014 by woit

The Defense Department has awarded a $7.5 million grant to Steve Awodey of CMU, Vladimir Voevodsky of the IAS and others to support research in Homotopy Type Theory and the foundations of mathematics. I had thought that getting DARPA 10 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Raising the Bar

Posted on April 23, 2014 by woit

If you’re looking for something to do next Tuesday evening here in New York, an event called Raising the Bar has recruited 50 people to give talks at bars around the city. There are some quite interesting talks on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics

Posted on April 15, 2014 by woit

The May issue of Scientific American has a very good cover story by Joe Lykken and Maria Spiropulu, entitled Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics (the article is now behind their subscriber paywall, but for those with access to Nature, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 51 Comments

Ten Years of Not Even Wrong

Posted on April 11, 2014 by woit

This blog was started a little bit over ten years ago, and I’ve been intending for a while to write something marking the occasion and commenting on what has changed over the past ten years. I’ve found this mostly a … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 62 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on April 5, 2014 by woit

Just time at the moment for some quick links. I’ll start with some math news, since there hasn’t been much of that here recently: Matt Baker has the sad news here of the death of Berkeley mathematician Robert Coleman recently, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

Sheldon Gives Up On String Theory

Posted on April 1, 2014 by woit

Ten years ago I wrote here about the news that Witten had finally given up on string theory. Today I just heard a similar but even more dramatic rumor: next week’s episode of The Big Bang Theory features string theorist … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

A Brief History of String Theory

Posted on March 26, 2014 by woit

On the long plane flight to Italy I had the chance to read the recently published A Brief History of String Theory: From Dual Models to M-theory by philosopher of science Dean Rickles. The book deals with the history of … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 11 Comments

B-mode News

Posted on March 25, 2014 by woit

While I was away on vacation, the big news in physics was the BICEP2 result on B-modes in the CMB. Maybe it’s just as well I wasn’t available to blog about this, since inflation and cosmology aren’t at all my … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 48 Comments