Author Archives: woit

(Imaginary) Time Asymmetry

Posted on August 6, 2020 by woit

When people write down a list of axioms for quantum mechanics, they typically neglect to include a crucial one: positivity (or more generally, boundedness below) of the energy. This is equivalent to saying that something very different happens when you … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Mechanics | 22 Comments

Yesterday’s Hype

Posted on August 1, 2020 by woit

Every summer CERN runs a summer student programme, designed to bring in a group of students to participate in scientific activities at CERN and provide lectures for them about the basics and latest state of the field of high energy … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 28 Comments

What is “Spin”?

Posted on July 23, 2020 by woit

The explanation for the lack of blogging here the past month is mostly that I haven’t seen any news worth blogging about. It took only a little bit of self-control to not do things like make snarky comments about recent … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 28 Comments

HEP News

Posted on June 18, 2020 by woit

The CERN Council is meeting today and tomorrow, and should approve the long-awaited 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. There will be a live webcast of the open part of the Council meeting on Friday. My understanding … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 37 Comments

HEP Theory Job Situation

Posted on June 17, 2020 by woit

Way back in the 1980s and 1990s I was, for obvious personal reasons, paying close attention to the job situation for young HEP theorists. They were not good at all: way more talented young theorists than jobs, many if not … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions

Posted on June 15, 2020 by woit

Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a few of the lectures available here. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

An Advertisement for Representation Theory

Posted on June 9, 2020 by woit

There’s a new article at Quanta today promoting representation theory, Kevin Hartnett’s The ‘Useless’ Perspective that Transformed Mathematics. Representation theory is a central, unifying theme in modern mathematics, one that deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets, with … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

The Week’s Anti-Hype

Posted on May 27, 2020 by woit

I never thought I would see this happen: a university PR department correcting media hype about its research. You might have noticed this comment here a week ago, about a flurry of media hype about neutrinos and parallel universes. A … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Oral Histories

Posted on May 24, 2020 by woit

I recently ran across a recent interview with Mary K. Gaillard, which encouraged me to look again at the AIP’s oral histories site. For a review of her autobiographical book, see here. She has the following comments on the current … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Final Fourier Analysis Notes

Posted on May 18, 2020 by woit

Our semester here at Columbia is finally over, and I’ve put the lecture notes on Fourier analysis that I wrote up in one document here. A previous blog posting explained the origin of the notes: they cover the second half … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments