Category Archives: Uncategorized

Peter Goddard on the Birth of String Theory

Posted on February 25, 2008 by woit

Last spring there was a conference held in Florence which brought together many of those who worked on dual models and string theory during the late sixties and early seventies. Slides from the talks are here, and many of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on February 22, 2008 by woit

There seems to be a political scandal going on in Italy revolving around the GIM mechanism, with Antonino Zichichi somehow involved. Definitely a higher level of scandal than we have here in the US. An Oral History Project at Princeton … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

US HEP Demography

Posted on February 18, 2008 by woit

Late last week there was a meeting of HEPAP in Washington, presentations available here. Several dealt with the current budget situation, which is basically that the current FY2008 budget is a disaster, and the Bush administration has proposed huge compensatory … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Late Night HEP TV

Posted on February 13, 2008 by woit

Particle physics is enjoying a wave of popularity on the late night talk shows this week. On Friday, MIT experimentalist Peter Fisher appeared on the Conan O’Brien show, helping O’Brien see how long he could keep his wedding ring spinning … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Quantum Field Theory, As Seen By Mathematicians

Posted on February 11, 2008 by woit

In recent years, interest in quantum field theory among mathematicians has gone through ups and downs, in a sub-field dependent manner, as ideas rooted in quantum field theory have turned out to be mathematically useful in a variety of contexts. … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Is Big Physics peddling science pornography?

Posted on February 7, 2008 by woit

There’s a new round of nonsense about theoretical physics making its way through the media, especially the British tabloids. The original source is a preprint from a few months ago by Aref’eva and Volovich entitled Time Machine at the LHC … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 46 Comments

Worth Reading

Posted on February 6, 2008 by woit

The latest issue of the Cern Courier contains a wonderful article entitled From BCS to the LHC by Steven Weinberg. It is based on a talk he gave at a recent conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the BCS theory … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Microsoft Research New England

Posted on February 4, 2008 by woit

Microsoft announced today that they’ll be opening a new research lab, in Cambridge, which will be called Microsoft Research New England. The director of the lab will be mathematical physicist Jennifer Chayes, with deputy director her husband Christian Borgs, who … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Steinhardt: The Anthropic Landscape Has Run Its Course

Posted on February 3, 2008 by woit

Over at John Horgan’s blog, he quotes an e-mail from Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt, who corrects Horgan’s account of a recent conversation between them, writing I said that I thought that the idea of a string landscape and the notion … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

2007: Year of the Unparticle

Posted on January 25, 2008 by woit

One can get some idea of what progress there might have been in particle theory during 2007 by querying the SPIRES database for 2007 papers that already have lots of citations. Doing find topcite 50+ and date 2007 turns up … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 31 Comments