Category Archives: This Week’s Hype

This Week’s Hype

Posted on March 14, 2011 by woit

The LHC is back in business, producing stable colliding beams for the first time this year, although still with a small number of bunches and thus a low luminosity. The number of bunches and luminosity will increase over the next … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, This Week's Hype | 22 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on February 21, 2011 by woit

A session on results from the LHC at last week’s AAAS meeting has generated some news reports about results from the heavy ion run, see here and here. Under the heading “String theory supported”, MSNBC reports: Previous experiments conducted at … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 23 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on December 11, 2010 by woit

This week’s contribution to the long tradition of universities issuing press releases hyping non-existent “experimental tests of string theory” by their employees is from Duke University, which advertises “String Theory in a Lab“. This is based on a paper that … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 30 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on November 3, 2010 by woit

Way back in 1997, string theorists were already getting rather touchy about people pointing out string theory’s testability problems. At that time, Gordon Kane published an article in Physics Today with the title String Theory is Testable, Even Supertestable in … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 33 Comments

Researchers Discover How to Conduct First Test of “Untestable” String Theory

Posted on September 1, 2010 by woit

A couple people this morning pointed me to today’s press release from Imperial College, headlined Researchers Discover How to Conduct First Test of “Untestable” String Theory and subtitled “New study suggests researchers can now test the ‘theory of everything’”. In … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 14 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on August 25, 2010 by woit

I’m rather busy these days with a move to a new apartment, but maybe there’s time for a quick edition of “This Week’s Hype”. A commenter on the previous posting points to Amanda Peet’s recent talk entitled String Theory for … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 17 Comments

Hype or Not Hype?

Posted on August 6, 2010 by woit

The high point of my expertise in condensed matter physics was about thirty years ago, when I studied the subject in order to pass one of the general exams at Princeton. At the party after the test was graded, Phil … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 65 Comments

God Particles Breeding Like Bosons

Posted on June 15, 2010 by woit

Science news in the media today is full of stories about Fermilab finding no less than five Higgs particles: God Particles Breeding Like Bosons, The ‘God Particle’ may exist in five forms, Large Hadron Collider’s rival project finds, US experiment … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, This Week's Hype | 9 Comments

More Quantum Information Theory From String Theory

Posted on May 27, 2010 by woit

Claims made recently in the CERN Courier that string theory can be applied to Quantum Information Theory (see here) are being followed up with a new paper entitled Four-qubit entanglement from string theory which appears to claim that, despite what … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 9 Comments

Applying String Theory to Quantum Information Theory

Posted on May 10, 2010 by woit

There’s a remarkable article by Mike Duff in this month’s CERN Courier, arguing the case that string theory does too have important applications: in Quantum Information Theory. The claim seems to be that since the same algebraic structures appear in … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 38 Comments