Author Archives: woit

Weinberg on Symmetry

The latest New York Review of Books has an article by Steven Weinberg entitled Symmetry: A ‘Key to Nature’s Secrets’. It’s a bit unusual for the NYRB, since it is both scientifically more technical than usual for them (coming from … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

News From Europe

A few items with a European flavor: The news from Dublin is that Witten will be in town soon to give the Hamilton Lecture, with the Irish Times reporting that Witten’s Hamilton Lecture will abandon string theory, however, in favour … Continue reading

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Uncategorized | 22 Comments

What’s That at the Top of This Page?

The graphic chosen years ago as the header for this blog is an event display from the UA1 detector in 1982, of historical importance since it was the first event found with a W candidate. To be honest, the reason … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

P-adic Numbers and Cosmology

The next math department colloquium at Stanford will feature Lenny Susskind lecturing on p-adic numbers and cosmology, here’s the abstract: The biggest conceptual problem of cosmology is called the measure problem. It has to do with the assignment of probabilities … Continue reading

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 18 Comments

Two for Two

Back in 2004 I made my first venture into Nobel Prize predictions, then decided to retire from that business. This year I came out of retirement with another prediction. After the posting, I consulted with experts who assured me that … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

New Pursuit of Schrodinger’s Cat

Prospect magazine has an excellent new article by Philip Ball on recent developments in the fundamental problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics: why don’t we see superpositions? Most popular discussions of this seem to me to be stuck back … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

This Week’s Hype

It had to happen. New Scientist managed to find a physicist willing to describe the OPERA result as “evidence for string theory”: So if OPERA’s results hold up, they could provide support for the existence of sterile neutrinos, extra dimensions … Continue reading

Posted in This Week's Hype | 69 Comments

This and That

Since everyone wants to hear about the faster-than-light neutrinos, here’s some additional information about why I don’t believe it. Jon Butterworth explains here the problem with timing the neutrinos at the CERN end. In a postscript, a senior member of … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments

TEDxFlanders

Tommaso Dorigo and I put on a bit of a show yesterday here in Antwerp at TEDxFlanders, and the results are already available on YouTube (and Tommaso has blog postings here and here). Doing this sort of thing for 1000 … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

No News

I’ve been hearing no interesting news from the LHC recently, about all I’ve learned is that CMS/ATLAS haven’t even decided whether it’s worth combining their latest public data (probably not, what is much more interesting is the large amount of … Continue reading

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 71 Comments