Author Archives: woit

What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?

Posted on January 14, 2014 by woit

Every year John Brockman’s Edge web-site hosts responses to a different question. This year the question was What scientific idea is ready for retirement?. It shouldn’t be too hard to guess what I chose to write about, with results available … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 70 Comments

Scientists Find a Practical Test for String Theory

Posted on January 6, 2014 by woit

This sort of thing seemed to be dying down (2013 required a record low number of “This Week’s Hype” postings), but 2014 is starting off with the usual promotion by physicists of nonsense about how they have “found a test … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 46 Comments

Short Items

Posted on January 2, 2014 by woit

Harvard has announced that the Chinese firm Evergrande Group will be supporting various activities at Harvard, including a new Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications, with S.-T. Yau as director. No details of what the center will do other than … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Acknowledgments

Posted on December 30, 2013 by woit

Two of the prominent string theorists working on ideas about holography and cosmology featured in Amanda Gefter’s new book are Tom Banks and Willy Fischler, who have a new paper out on the subject, entitled Holographic Space-time and Newton’s Law. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn

Posted on December 29, 2013 by woit

Amanda Gefter, a science writer who has often covered theoretical physics topics for New Scientist, has a new book coming out soon, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. On one level it’s a memoir, telling a story that begins with her father … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 11 Comments

Trust the math? An Update

Posted on December 21, 2013 by woit

Back in September, I wrote here about the news that Snowden’s revelations that confirmed suspicions that back in 2005-6 NSA mathematicians had compromised an NIST standard for elliptic-curve cryptography. The new standard was promoted as an improvement using sophisticated mathematical … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

Latest on abc

Posted on December 19, 2013 by woit

In case you haven’t been following this story, “abc” refers to a famous conjecture in number theory, for which Shin Mochizuki claimed last year (see here) to have found a proof. His argument for abc involves a new set of … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture | 32 Comments

A Bubble-Universe at Stanford

Posted on December 19, 2013 by woit

Video from last weekend’s Fundamental Physics Prize scientific meeting at Stanford is now available, in unedited form, here. The first video there is a discussion moderated by Yuri Milner, who does a good job of asking Strominger, Polchinski, Green, Schwarz … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 5 Comments

Milner-Zuckerberg Prizes for Mathematics

Posted on December 13, 2013 by woit

At the Hollywood-style awards ceremony last night for $3 million string theory and biomedical research prizes, it was announced that Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg will now start funding something similar in mathematics, called the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. According … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 65 Comments

2014 Milner Prizes

Posted on December 11, 2013 by woit

Last March an Oscar-style ceremony hosted by Morgan Freeman was held in Geneva (see here) to award the 2013 \$3 million Milner Prize to Princeton string theorist Alexander Polyakov. Tomorrow an even more lavish ceremony designed to turn “Oscars of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments