Category Archives: Uncategorized

P5 Report

Posted on December 7, 2023 by woit

There is a HEPAP meeting going on today, with release of the long-awaited P5 report prioritizing future HEP spending. The report is available here now, to be officially unveiled later in the day and discussed at the HEPAP meeting. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Unification, Spinors, Twistors, String Theory

Posted on November 22, 2023 by woit

Last month I recorded a podcast with Curt Jaimungal for his Theories of Everything site, and it’s now available with audio here, on Youtube here. There are quite a few other programs on the site well worth watching. Much of … Continue reading →

Posted in Euclidean Twistor Unification, Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Frenkel on String Theory

Posted on September 20, 2023 by woit

Curt Jaimungal’s Theories of Everything podcast has a new episode featuring a long talk with Edward Frenkel (by the way, I’ll be doing one of these next month). A few months ago I wrote about a Lex Fridman podcast with … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on August 24, 2023 by woit

The math department at Columbia this fall will be hosting three special lecture series, each with some connection to physics (at least in my mind…): Sergiu Klainerman will be lecturing on the proof of nonlinear stability for slowly rotating black … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture, Uncategorized | 13 Comments

The Philosophy of Supersymmetry

Posted on August 16, 2023 by woit

A few months back I saw a call for papers for a volume on “Establishing the philosophy of supersymmetry”. For a while I was thinking of writing something, since the general topic of supersymmetry is a complex and interesting one, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Understanding Confinement

Posted on July 12, 2023 by woit

This week and next there’s an interesting summer school going on at the IAS, with topic Understanding Confinement. Videos of talks are available here or at the IAS video site. Taking a look at some of the first talks brings … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

A Mathematics AI Factory?

Posted on July 2, 2023 by woit

A few days ago I read a fascinating article in New York magazine: Inside the AI Factory, which explained how the very large business of hiring humans to do tasks that generate training data for AI works. One reaction I … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Fantasy, Faith and Physics

Posted on June 30, 2023 by woit

No blogging here the past few weeks, partly because I was away on vacation for a little while, but more because there hasn’t been anything I’ve seen worth writing about. Yesterday’s pulsar timing array and IceCube announcements unfortunately didn’t tell … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

From Quantum Mechanics to Number Theory via the Oscillator Representation

Posted on June 1, 2023 by woit

This past semester I taught our graduate class on Lie groups and representations, and spent part of the course on the Heisenberg group and the oscillator representation. Since the end of the semester I’ve been trying to clean up and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on May 30, 2023 by woit

A few unrelated items: I’ve been hearing from several people about their plans to travel to China this summer, just realized that they’re all going there for the same reason, to participate in the First International Congress of Basic Science. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments