Author Archives: woit

Yesterday Sean Carroll and I appeared on the BBC Radio 4 program The Material World, in a segment on String theory – knot good enough?, about the controversy over string theory. The segment started with a piece from the play … Continue reading →

Experimenters at the Tevatron have released data showing the existence of a new baryon, built out of a down, strange and bottom quark, and having a mass of 5.774 +/- .019 GeV. It has been given the name “Ξb“. The … Continue reading →

Pretty much everybody in the math community seems to be getting a blog. Many of the new bloggers are quite good research mathematicians (including even some Fields Medalists). Two very new ones are: Secret Blogging Seminar: Named after a “Secret … Continue reading →

Last week both SLAC and Fermilab hosted “Users Meetings”, providing a forum to discuss the current status and future plans of the two laboratories. The SLAC agenda is here, and talks from previous years are available here, with this year’s … Continue reading →

Yesterday evening there was a public debate about string theory held in Paris, between Lee Smolin and Thibault Damour. So far, accounts of the debate have appeared in Le Monde and at Fabien Besnard’s blog Mathephysique. The Le Monde article … Continue reading →

In recent years many people in the particle theory community have been wondering what’s going on with the Stanford theory group, as it has become dominated by work on things like the anthropic landscape. It turns out that, for a … Continue reading →

There seems to be a peculiar trend going on in the particle theory community. Just about all theorists I talk to, correspond with, argue with on blogs, etc. claim to be quite unhappy with the Landscape, and insist that most … Continue reading →

Here are various things of interest that accumulated while I was away: Last week there was a conference in Florence on the early history of string theory, some of the talks are available here. Lots of blogging activity among Fields … Continue reading →