Yearly Archives: 2004

My Life as a Quant

Posted on October 4, 2004 by woit

Last week I was in a bookstore and ran across a new book by Emanuel Derman called My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance. Derman got a particle theory Ph. D. here at Columbia in 1973 when … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Whatever

Posted on October 1, 2004 by woit

Over at sci.physics.strings there’s the scary sight of Lubos Motl agreeing with me in a posting about “Stringy Naturalness”. Well, maybe he isn’t directly saying he agrees with me, but “It would be too difficult for me to pretend that … Continue reading →

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Some History

Posted on September 30, 2004 by woit

There’s an interesting new preprint by the historian of mathematics Erhard Scholz about the early history of the use of representation theory in quantum mechanics. Immediately after the beginnings of quantum mechanics in 1925, several people started to realize that … Continue reading →

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2004 Nobel Prizes in Physics

Posted on September 29, 2004 by woit

No, they haven’t announced the Nobel prizes yet this year. The announcement of the physics prize is scheduled for mid-day (Stockholm time) next Tuesday. I have zero inside information about who is likely to get the prize this year, but … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 29 Comments

What the Bleep Do We Know?

Posted on September 27, 2004 by woit

Last night I went to see a movie which was advertised as being about quantum physics, called “What the Bleep Do We Know?”. I was expecting something pretty dumb, but am always interested to see what people think about quantum … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Film Reviews | 21 Comments

This Week’s Predictions

Posted on September 20, 2004 by woit

A new preprint by Michael Douglas indicates that, at least this week, the latest “predictions” from string theory are for: 1. No large extra dimensions. 2. No low scale supersymmetry. So it looks like the “prediction” of the string theory … Continue reading →

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String Geometry at Snowbird

Posted on September 19, 2004 by woit

Thomas Larsson wrote in a comment mentioning a news story that appeared early this past summer in the Deseret Morning News (yes, that’s Deseret, not Desert; this is a name Mormons use to refer to Utah). The news story is … Continue reading →

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Motl on String Field Theory

Posted on September 17, 2004 by woit

Lubos Motl has an interesting post on sci.physics.stringsthat gives a detailed explanation of the current state of string field theory. One way of motivating quantum field theory is to start with a “first-quantized” quantum theory of particles (perhaps defined by … Continue reading →

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CERN at 50

Posted on September 16, 2004 by woit

This month is the 50th anniversary of the formal founding of the CERN laboratory near Geneva. There’s a very interesting article in Physics World about CERN and its future plans. LHC construction seems to be proceeding more or less on … Continue reading →

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Grothendieck Biographical Article

Posted on September 14, 2004 by woit

The latest issue of the Notices of the AMS contains the first part of a long biographical article about Grothendieck written by Allyn Jackson. Evidently Winfried Scharlau is writing a biography of Grothendieck, and Jackson’s article is partially based on … Continue reading →

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