Author Archives: woit

Many string theorists seem to have decided to react to the criticisms of string theory that have recently been getting a lot of attention by going to the press with claims to have experimental tests of string theory that can … Continue reading →

The March issue of Physics Today is now available. It contains a piece by Steven Weinberg based on a banquet talk he gave to a group of postdocs. He describes his own memories of his time as a postdoc, writing … Continue reading →

There’s an article in this week’s Science magazine by Adrian Cho entitled Dreams Collide With Reality for International Experiment. It’s about DOE Undersecretary Orbach’s warning to HEPAP (mentioned here) that current plans were too optimistic about the time-scale for the … Continue reading →

There’s a new issue of Symmetry magazine out. It is a bimonthly magazine about particle physics put out by SLAC and Fermilab, and often has interesting and informative articles. But, even though I generally read the whole thing when it … Continue reading →

The Princeton Physics department colloquium on “New Neutrino Oscillation Results from the MiniBooNE Experiment” scheduled for this Thursday has been canceled. I wonder what is going on with that. Have they not opened the box yet on their result, or … Continue reading →

Over at Dynamics of Cats, Steinn Sigurdsson has a posting on Yarn Theory, to some extent a review of Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics. Steinn is an astrophysicist, but started out life as a string theorist before getting disillusioned … Continue reading →

Alain Connes is now a blogger, contributing to the new Noncommutative Geometry blog. There will be a conference in his honor next month in Paris. Today and tomorrow there’s a HEPAP meeting going on in Washington, with some of the … Continue reading →

At the big AAAS conference held in San Francisco the past few days there was a session on “A New Frontier in Particle Physics”, about the LHC and the promise of physics at the TeV scale. Burton Richter’s talk there … Continue reading →

Terry Tao’s article What is Good Mathematics?, written for the Bulletin of the AMS, is now available at the arXiv. There’s a new article also on the arXiv by Zvi Bern et al. explicitly constructing the 3-loop 4-point amplitude of … Continue reading →

The March issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. Excellent summaries of the mathematical work of the 2006 Fields medalists and interviews with three of them (everybody except Perelman). By the way, does anyone know if the 2006 … Continue reading →