Author Archives: woit

Michael Atiyah and Graeme Segal have a new foundational paper out on twisted K-theory. It doesn’t have too many examples or applications, but lays a rigorous foundation for a certain point of view on the subject. Section 5 is the … Continue reading →

Throughout the mid-to-late 80s, the NSF and other organizations would periodically issue alarmist reports about an impending dangerous shortage of scientists and engineers in the U.S. These projections for shortages turned out to be utter nonsense, as anyone who looked … Continue reading →

The buzz is that Hawking has a new idea about how to resolve the “Black Hole Information Paradox”, the well known incompatibility between standard ideas about black holes and the unitary time evolution of the wave function that is fundamental … Continue reading →

One contributor to the comments here (JC) has pointed out that Susskind has withdrawn from the arXiv his recent paper on the stupendous Landscape of sting theory. This is pretty unusual, but often when it happens the author puts in … Continue reading →

Some of the talks given at the Lattice 2004 conference are now available on-line. Particularly interesting is Kenneth Wilson’s historical talk about his roles in the development of the renormalization group and of lattice gauge theory. He also refers to … Continue reading →

It seems that the Fermilab Tevatron is a quite sensitive detector for earthquakes. According to the Accelerator Update for yesterday, a small earthquake in Illinois caused the machine to lose its beam and a superconducting magnet to quench. A few … Continue reading →

Two of the year’s largest particle theory conferences are taking place around now, with Lattice 2004 attracting 280 physicists to Batavia, Illinois this past week and Strings 2004 drawing almost 500 to Paris starting tomorrow. Normally I feel kind of … Continue reading →

Just got the following e-mail: Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 19:40:58 +0200 From: fau.alex (fau.alex@wanadoo.fr) To: woit@cpw.math.columbia.edu Subject: Mr Woit hi, I am a french student and I will go in 1re(in France) the next year and I want to … Continue reading →

The KITP at Santa Barbara seems to be going all out to hype claims of observability by LIGO of effects of cosmic strings. The front page of the KITP website prominently features the story, and adds the personal phone numbers … Continue reading →