Author Archives: woit

Complex Structures on the Six-sphere

Posted on January 9, 2005 by woit

A preprint by Andrei Marshakov and Antti Niemi appeared on hep-th this evening making a remarkable claim. According to this preprint, a few weeks before passing away recently at the age of 93, Shiing-Shen Chern completed a preprint entitled “On … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

What is a Brane?

Posted on January 6, 2005 by woit

Greg Moore has written an article for the latest Notices of the AMS entitled “WHAT IS… a Brane?”. He begins by noting that “The term ‘brane’ has come to mean many things to many people” and one of the difficulties … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Anderson and Others at the Edge

Posted on January 4, 2005 by woit

Several people wrote in this morning to tell me about Phil Anderson’s comments about string theory that appeared in the New York Times today. These originally come from John Brockman’s “Edge” web-site where he has gathered responses from more than … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments

More Science Fiction

Posted on January 2, 2005 by woit

It seems that every week there’s a new book out about branes, M-theory, the multiverse, etc. by someone who doesn’t really seem to understand the difference between science and science fiction. This week’s example is Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds: A … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 22 Comments

On Crackpotism and Other Things

Posted on December 31, 2004 by woit

I haven’t posted anything new here in a while, with the holidays and trying to get over a bad cold keeping me otherwise occupied. Partly because of this the comments section has been to some degree taken over by people … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 68 Comments

Mathematical Humor

Posted on December 22, 2004 by woit

Now for some comic relief: A new issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. It contains an entertaining article entitled Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor with many examples of mathematical humor. Physicists also put in an … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Strominger Interview

Posted on December 22, 2004 by woit

There’s an interview with Andy Strominger in the Calcutta newspaper The Telegraph. Strominger was presumably in India for the string theory conference there this past week. The thing I found interesting about the interview was how skeptical the interviewer was, … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Out Of This World

Posted on December 20, 2004 by woit

The second popular physics book I’ve read recently is infinitely sillier than Watson’s book on QCD. It’s called Out Of This World by Stephen Webb. Its subtitle “Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics” gives some … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 12 Comments

Book Review: The Quantum Quark

Posted on December 20, 2004 by woit

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been reading several popular or semi-popular books about particle physics. I thought I’d make a few comments about them here. The first one is called The Quantum Quark by Andrew Watson. It covers the … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 14 Comments

The First Evidence For String Theory?

Posted on December 16, 2004 by woit

I was wondering why there were lots and lots of hits on this weblog today coming from Google searches for “first evidence for string theory”. It looks like the answer is this lead article from the latest New Scientist magazine. … Continue reading →

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