Category Archives: Uncategorized

Langlands/Frenkel and Some Other Things

Posted on November 16, 2018 by woit

The Canadian publication The Walrus today has a wonderful article about Robert Langlands, focusing on his attitude towards the geometric Langlands program and its talented proponent Edward Frenkel. I watched Frenkel’s talk at the ongoing Minnesota conference via streaming video … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands, Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Updates

Posted on November 1, 2018 by woit

Based on this preprint from Banks and Fischler, I added an update to the FAQ entry about why the ever-popular “string theory makes predictions, but only at high energies where they can’t be tested” argument is not true. This preprint … Continue reading →

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Breaking News

Posted on October 17, 2018 by woit

Two midday breaking news items: The ACME II experiment is reporting today a new, nearly order of magnitude better, limit on the electric dipole moment of the electron: $$|d_e|\leq 1.1 \times 10^{-29} e\ cm$$ The previous best bound was from … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on September 28, 2018 by woit

First, news related in some way to Australia: This summer the Sydney Morning Herald published a nice profile of Geordie Williamson. By the way, the ICM plenary lectures are finally available on video, with Williamson’s among those worth watching. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews, Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on August 31, 2018 by woit

A collection of links that may be of interest: Talks from the SM at 50 conference held earlier this summer are available here. A detailed expose of the “Fake Science Factory” is here, a related Nature story is here. For … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Quantum Supremacy

Posted on August 26, 2018 by woit

Hasn’t been much that I’ve heard about worth discussing here recently. Presumably everyone is on vacation. I’ll try and gather some things that may be of interest, starting first with the hot topic of “quantum computation”. It looks like this … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Back

Posted on August 6, 2018 by woit

Back now from vacation. On the global warming front, I can report that Northern Norway has gotten rather warm, Svalbard is still pretty cold. While I was away the big mathematics news was from the ICM. As everyone expected, one … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

Leaving Town

Posted on July 19, 2018 by woit

About to head out on vacation tonight, back in a couple weeks. On the hot topics in fundamental physics, two items are: Concerning the “no dS string vacua” conjecture, a new preprint begins by explaining why the existence or non-existence … Continue reading →

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Various Links

Posted on July 5, 2018 by woit

A random assortment of possibly interesting links: New videos from the IHES include new interviews, and talks from the recent Ofer Gabber conference. If you want to know more about prisms than what you can get from the video here, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

Posted on June 21, 2018 by woit

I’ve been thinking about what to write about this essay by Ben Allanach, which gives his take on the current state of HEP theory. Allanach is a specialist on the phenomenology of SUSY models, but here he announces that he’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments