Category Archives: Uncategorized

Just got the following e-mail: Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 19:40:58 +0200 From: fau.alex (fau.alex@wanadoo.fr) To: woit@cpw.math.columbia.edu Subject: Mr Woit hi, I am a french student and I will go in 1re(in France) the next year and I want to … Continue reading →

The KITP at Santa Barbara seems to be going all out to hype claims of observability by LIGO of effects of cosmic strings. The front page of the KITP website prominently features the story, and adds the personal phone numbers … Continue reading →

After an expensive upgrade to increase its luminosity, the Tevatron at Fermilab was turned back on in March 2001 to start “Run II”, during which it was hoped that the machine would run with a dramatically higher luminosity than during … Continue reading →

There’s a quite remarkable article by Barry Mazur in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the AMS. It brings together ideas about elliptic curves and deformations of Galois representations that were used by Wiles to prove Fermat’s last theorem, … Continue reading →

At an early stage in the Los Alamos preprint archive it was split up into hep-th (for more formal or speculative work not directly relevant to experiment) and hep-ph (for “phenomenological” papers directly related to experiment). Susskind has just come … Continue reading →

Recently I’ve been reading a new book, The Evidence for the Top Quark, by a philosopher of science named Kent Staley. It’s a combination of a history of the CDF collaboration’s work leading up to their claim to have discovered … Continue reading →

According to a press release from UCSB, three theoretical physicists have proposed “the most viable test to date for determining whether string theory is on the right track”. This is based on a paper about cosmic strings where the authors … Continue reading →

From one of the comments here I see that the Bogdanovs have put the reports on their theses on the CERN document server. One should perhaps take these with a grain of salt given their source. For instance, I wouldn’t … Continue reading →

Louis de Branges is a mathematician at Purdue who has had a long history of claiming proofs of the Riemann hypothesis. His latest claim has lead to a press release from Purdue. The press release points to what seems to … Continue reading →

A couple years ago two French brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, managed to get Ph.Ds in France and publish several nonsensical papers about quantum gravity in refereed physics journals, several of them rather well-known and prestigious ones. John Baez has … Continue reading →