Author Archives: woit

String Universality Reloaded

Posted on June 12, 2009 by woit

I still haven’t figured out yet what the arXiv’s trackback policy is, since trackbacks to my blog entries sometimes appear there, sometimes not. One example in the “not” category is my recent posting about the Kumar-Taylor paper on “String Universality”, … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 17 Comments

Latest From the LHC

Posted on June 9, 2009 by woit

Last week was the annual Fermilab User’s Meeting, for all sorts of interesting talks see here. These included a talk by Sergio Bertolucci giving recent news about the LHC status. This week CERN is hosting a CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 17 Comments

String Universality

Posted on June 7, 2009 by woit

There’s a new paper out on the arXiv this evening, advertising a new concept called “string universality”. The authors argue that in six dimensions, by use of appropriate compactifications, any consistent 6d supergravity theory has a string theory realization. They … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 28 Comments

Multiverse News

Posted on June 1, 2009 by woit

Some items from around the multiverse: Srednicki and Hartle have a new preprint on hep-th about Science in a Very Large Universe. Like many other multiverse papers, it doesn’t really have any equations in it, so it’s a bit hard … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 37 Comments

LHC: status and commissioning plans

Posted on June 1, 2009 by woit

The LHC’s Mike Lamont has just posted a preprint here based on a recent Moriond talk describing the current status of the LHC commissioning. Here is his discussion of the on-going campaign to identify bad splices and figure out what … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | Comments Off on LHC: status and commissioning plans

The Music of the Superstrings

Posted on June 1, 2009 by woit

String theorist Oswaldo Zapata continues (see here for an earlier posting about this) his remarkable series of essays about string theory and how it came to dominate research in theoretical high energy physics. The latest one, entitled The Music of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Interview With Simons and Yang

Posted on June 1, 2009 by woit

Steve Miller pointed me to a fascinating interview with Jim Simons and C. N. Yang, available on YouTube here. Simons tells the story of how he got kicked out of his job at the IDA in 1968 over his opposition … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

No Landscape and No Math in Rome

Posted on May 29, 2009 by woit

Strings 2009 is about three weeks away, and it will bring 450 or so string theorists to Rome. The topics of the talks at the Strings 200x conferences give a good idea of what the hot topics in the field … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Role Reversal

Posted on May 29, 2009 by woit

It used to be that New Scientist had somewhat of a reputation for publishing misleading articles about speculative physics, and Science News was a more stodgy but reliable publication that stuck to serious physics. Recently there has been a role … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 2 Comments

Singer Birthday Conference

Posted on May 28, 2009 by woit

Last weekend I was up in Cambridge attending the conference in honor of Is Singer’s 85th birthday. Singer has had a very long and distinguished career in mathematics, much of it at MIT, where he arrived as one of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments