Category Archives: Uncategorized

Are Fermion Masses Like Planetary Orbits?

Posted on April 14, 2004 by woit

A more and more common argument one hears from string theorists these days (for one version see a recent anonymous comment posted here) goes more or less like this: “A fundamental theory shouldn’t be expected to predict things like fermion … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Young String Theorist Did OK On His Final

Posted on April 5, 2004 by woit

A while back when looking for theoretical physics related weblogs I ran across The Search For A Theory of Myself: The Struggle Against String Theory which at first sounded right up my alley. It turns out to be the weblog … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Young String Theorist Did OK On His Final

String Theorists Finally Admit Defeat

Posted on April 1, 2004 by woit

The news that next week’s “Science Times” will run an article by NYT reporter James Glanz in which several leading string theorists say that they are giving up on the idea is rapidly spreading throughout the particle theory community. Evidently … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Various Hype

Posted on March 29, 2004 by woit

A recent new experimental result from Brookhaven has lead to some news stories like: Theory of matter in for a “sensational” revision which sounds pretty exciting. If you look into this more carefully, you’ll find that it’s based on a … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Various Hype

Atiyah and Singer Share Abel Prize

Posted on March 26, 2004 by woit

The Abel prize is a new yearly prize in mathematics, intended to function somewhat like a Nobel Prize for mathematics. The first one was awarded last year to Jean-Pierre Serre and this year’s has gone to Sir Michael Atiyah and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

My (Not So) Brilliant Career

Posted on March 26, 2004 by woit

One of the weirder things that happened yesterday was that I noticed there was a long thread in a discussion group about my academic qualifications. You can find this at Physics Forums My academic career has been a bit unusual, … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Various Stuff on the Web

Posted on March 23, 2004 by woit

One can keep track of what is going on in theoretical physics now by taking a look at conference websites. Often after the conference they put up speaker’s transparencies or even audio or video of the talk. Some very recent … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Questions for Cosmologists

Posted on March 21, 2004 by woit

I was pleased to get a comment from cosmologist Sean Carroll frighteningly soon after starting this thing up. Here’s some questions about cosmology that have been on my mind recently, maybe he or someone else will be able to answer … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The Holy Grail of Physics

Posted on March 21, 2004 by woit

It’s pretty common these days for people to refer to successfully quantizing general relativity as “the Holy Grail of Physics”, but it seems to me that there is a different problem that better deserves this name: “Why does the vacuum … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

Talk by David Gross

Posted on March 19, 2004 by woit

Last Friday I went to hear a talk by David Gross at the CUNY Graduate Center on “The Coming Revolutions in Fundamental Physics”. This was more or less Gross’s standard advertisement for string theory that he has been giving for … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments