Author Archives: woit

The transparencies from the conference on twistor string theory held two weeks ago at Oxford are now available on-line. Quite a few of the talks deal with the technical details of computing amplitudes. For the motivation from phenomenological particle theory, … Continue reading →

There’s a quite interesting article on the controversy over string theory that appeared yesterday in the Boston University student newspaper. It gives some insight into the political battle now going on in many physics departments. The Boston University physics department … Continue reading →

There’s a new TV show called “NUMB3RS” starting tonight, whose main character is a mathematican named “Charlie”, who solves crimes using mathematics. His motto is “Everything is Numbers”. A secondary character is “Larry”, a Caltech physicist working on 11d supergravity. … Continue reading →

Robbert Dijkgraaf is about the most lucid expositor around on the topic of what now goes under the name “topological strings”. This week he’s been giving the Coxeter Lectures at the Fields Institute in Toronto, and the slides and audio … Continue reading →

Today’s Guardian has an article by a writer who recently visited the Institute in Princeton to talk to Witten and others there about string theory. The author of the piece makes the obvious analogy between Witten and Einstein, and asks … Continue reading →

Most new preprints in mathematics and physics these days are posted on the arXiv, but every so often I run into interesting new things worth reading that haven’t appeared there for one reason or another. Here are some recent examples: … Continue reading →

For some interesting comments by Nima Arkani-Hamed about his model-building activities, followed by some of my own, take a look here. Update: Jacques Distler has some comments on the Arkani-Hamed et. al. paper.

The world of particle physics web logging expanded by about an order of magnitude today, as a new web-site called Quantum Diaries came on-line. The idea seems to be to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s remarkable 1905 papers by … Continue reading →

As of yesterday, I’ve started deleting comments from this weblog if they seem to me to be completely off-topic or make no sense. By the end of last year, the comment section here had begun to turn into something I … Continue reading →

In recent years, as it has become clear that string theory can never be used to predict anything about the real world, string theorists have reacted to this state of affairs in various often bizarre ways. Tonight there’s a new … Continue reading →