Author Archives: woit

Applying String Theory to Quantum Information Theory

Posted on May 10, 2010 by woit

There’s a remarkable article by Mike Duff in this month’s CERN Courier, arguing the case that string theory does too have important applications: in Quantum Information Theory. The claim seems to be that since the same algebraic structures appear in … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 38 Comments

LHC Update: Bing Bang Machine Could Confirm or Disprove String Theory

Posted on May 5, 2010 by woit

Today’s CERN LHCC meeting had a wide-range of reports about how the machine is doing (1 nb-1 now, 10 nb-1 over the next 5 weeks), what the experiments are seeing (charm, Ws), and what physics might be possible with the … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, This Week's Hype | 16 Comments

First Results From XENON100

Posted on May 4, 2010 by woit

The XENON100 dark matter experiment now has a paper out reporting their first results, from a test run of 11 days. They claim a 90% confidence level exclusion of 50 GeV WIMPs with a spin-independent elastic cross-section above 3 x … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 7 Comments

String Vacuum Project 2010

Posted on May 3, 2010 by woit

I’ve written before about the String Vacuum Project (back in 2006 and 2008), and there was a story about it in Nature. This week they are having an SVP 2010 Spring Meeting at the KITP, talks available here. A proposal … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 5 Comments

Oy vey

Posted on April 30, 2010 by woit

Last Friday City College held a symposium here in Manhattan celebrating physics at City College. I was able to attend just the morning session, which began with a quick rescheduling of Anton Zeilinger for David Gross, who had overslept. Gross … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 20 Comments

Bohmian Spat

Posted on April 29, 2010 by woit

Here’s a story from the boundaries of conventional physics of the sort I normally try to resist paying any attention to, but couldn’t quite help myself this time: Last week I noticed amongst the e-mail from Jack Sarfatti that clutters … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Dark Matters

Posted on April 28, 2010 by woit

Initial 2010 data from the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill indicates that the particle theory job market remains as trend-driven as ever. This year, it seems that if you want a tenure-track job in the US, you must be … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 28 Comments

Podcasts

Posted on April 26, 2010 by woit

In case you’re tired of reading me going on about the same topics and instead would like to listen to me going on about such topics, there are now two new options: A couple weeks ago I did a podcast … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Tevatron vs. LHC

Posted on April 20, 2010 by woit

The news from Fermilab is that the Tevatron has set a new luminosity record, with a store last Friday that had an initial luminosity of 4.04 x 1032cm-2s-1, or, equivalently, 404 inverse microbarns/sec. For more about this, see a new … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 27 Comments

Three Mysteries

Posted on April 13, 2010 by woit

There’s a well-known list of high-profile problems in fundamental theoretical physics that have gotten most of the attention of the field during the past few decades (examples would be the problems of quantizing gravity, solving QCD, explaining dark energy, finding … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 76 Comments