Author Archives: woit

Two Pet Peeves

Posted on April 20, 2017 by woit

I was reminded of two of my pet peeves while taking a look at the appendix A of this paper. As a public service to physicists I thought I’d go on about them here, and provide some advice to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 28 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on April 16, 2017 by woit

A few quick items: I was very sorry to hear recently of the death of David Goss (obituary here), a mathematician specialist in function fields who was at Ohio State. David had a side interest in physics and was a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

The Social Bubble of Physics

Posted on April 7, 2017 by woit

Sabine Hossenfelder is on a tear this week, with two excellent and highly provocative pieces about research practice in theoretical physics, a topic on which she has become the field’s most perceptive critic. The first is in this month’s Nature … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 71 Comments

Some Math and Physics Interactions

Posted on April 5, 2017 by woit

Quanta magazine has a new article about physicists “attacking” the Riemann Hypothesis, based on the publication in PRL of this paper. The only comment from a mathematician evaluating relevance of this to a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis basically says … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

New LHC Results

Posted on March 22, 2017 by woit

This week results are being presented by the LHC experiments at the Moriond (twitter here) and Aspen conferences. While these so far have not been getting much publicity from CERN or in the media, they are quite significant, as first … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 60 Comments

This Time It’s For Real

Posted on March 10, 2017 by woit

Several months ago I was advertising a “Final draft version” of the book I’ve been working on forever. A month or two after that though, I realized that I could do a more careful job with some of the quantum … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Theory: The Book | 39 Comments

Can the Laws of Physics be Unified?

Posted on March 7, 2017 by woit

There’s a new book out this week from Princeton University Press, Paul Langacker’s Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified? (surely this is a mistake, but there’s also an ISBN number for a 2020 volume with the same name by … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews, Multiverse Mania | 25 Comments

Reality is Not What It Seems

Posted on March 4, 2017 by woit

This Sunday’s New York Times has a rather hostile review by Lisa Randall of Carlo Rovelli’s popular book Reality is Not What It Seems, which has recently come out in English in the US. Rovelli responds with a Facebook post. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Bertram Kostant 1928-2017

Posted on February 25, 2017 by woit

I was sorry to just hear via a comment here about the recent death of Bert Kostant, at the age of 88. MIT has a story about him here. Kostant was a major figure in the field of representation theory, … Continue reading →

Posted in Obituaries, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Various News

Posted on February 22, 2017 by woit

First some mathematics items: Igor Shafarevich, one of the great figures of twentieth century algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory, died this past weekend at the age of 93. Besides his many contributions to mathematics research, he was also a … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 15 Comments