Author Archives: woit

Number 999 or 1000

Posted on January 25, 2011 by woit

According to the WordPress software, this is either post 999 or 1000 on this blog, depending on whether you count one I haven’t gotten around to finishing. I’m not sure that number is reliable anyway, since there are various anomalies … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

News from Templeton and FQXi

Posted on January 18, 2011 by woit

The Templeton Foundation has just released their “2010 Capabilities Report“, a sort of bi-annual report. It shows that in 2009 they had assets of $1.5 billion, and spent $31.8 million on “Science and the Big Questions”. For 2010 two of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

More Short Items

Posted on January 16, 2011 by woit

There’s an excellent article by Michel Berube about the Sokal hoax, fifteen years later, entitled The Science Wars Redux. The latest Notices of the AMS has a review of the recent Yau-Nadis book by Nigel Hitchin (for my take, see … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

HEP News

Posted on January 11, 2011 by woit

While I was away at Stony Brook yesterday, every other blog and news source out there had a story you’ve surely seen about the DOE’s decision to turn down a proposal to seek funding to keep the Tevatron running past … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 6 Comments

Differential Cohomology at the Simons Center

Posted on January 11, 2011 by woit

This week the Simons Center is hosting a workshop on Differential Cohomology and its applications in physics. I won’t try and give an explanation of what differential cohomology is here, with a little luck the videos of the talks will … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

What the M Stands For

Posted on January 3, 2011 by woit

There’s an explanation at the latest Abstruse Goose. To recycle some of my own writing, from page 107 of NEW, the book: When I was a graduate student at Princeton, one day I was leaving the library perhaps thirty feet … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Ancient History

Posted on December 31, 2010 by woit

Sometime around now is the tenth anniversary of my first foray into the business of public criticism of string theory. I wrote something up over the end-of-year holiday in 2000, and circulated it by e-mail to a list of prominent … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 50 Comments

Short Items

Posted on December 21, 2010 by woit

The Tevatron last week passed the milestone of 10 inverse femtobarns of luminosity delivered to the experiments. That’s about 1.5 quadrillion collisions. Presentations from the Simons Center Inaugural Conference, discussed here, are now on-line. Luis Alvarez-Gaume and John Ellis discuss … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

HEP News

Posted on December 17, 2010 by woit

Besides the dramatic new CMS results mentioned in the last two postings, there’s other news from the high-energy frontier as it moves from Illinois to Geneva. Earlier this week the MCTP hosted a workshop on LHC First Data. Today at … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 10 Comments

String Theory Fails Another Test, the “Supertest”

Posted on December 17, 2010 by woit

Wednesday’s CMS result finding no black holes in early LHC data has led to internet headlines such as String Theory Fails First Major Experimental Test (for what this really means, see here). At a talk today at CERN, yet another … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 35 Comments