Monthly Archives: December 2004

On Crackpotism and Other Things

Posted on December 31, 2004 by woit

I haven’t posted anything new here in a while, with the holidays and trying to get over a bad cold keeping me otherwise occupied. Partly because of this the comments section has been to some degree taken over by people … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 68 Comments

Mathematical Humor

Posted on December 22, 2004 by woit

Now for some comic relief: A new issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. It contains an entertaining article entitled Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor with many examples of mathematical humor. Physicists also put in an … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Strominger Interview

Posted on December 22, 2004 by woit

There’s an interview with Andy Strominger in the Calcutta newspaper The Telegraph. Strominger was presumably in India for the string theory conference there this past week. The thing I found interesting about the interview was how skeptical the interviewer was, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 81 Comments

Book Review: Out Of This World

Posted on December 20, 2004 by woit

The second popular physics book I’ve read recently is infinitely sillier than Watson’s book on QCD. It’s called Out Of This World by Stephen Webb. Its subtitle “Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics” gives some … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 12 Comments

Book Review: The Quantum Quark

Posted on December 20, 2004 by woit

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been reading several popular or semi-popular books about particle physics. I thought I’d make a few comments about them here. The first one is called The Quantum Quark by Andrew Watson. It covers the … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 14 Comments

The First Evidence For String Theory?

Posted on December 16, 2004 by woit

I was wondering why there were lots and lots of hits on this weblog today coming from Google searches for “first evidence for string theory”. It looks like the answer is this lead article from the latest New Scientist magazine. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 74 Comments

Langlands Program and Physics

Posted on December 14, 2004 by woit

One of my minor hobbies over the years has been trying to understand something about the Langlands conjectures in number theory, partly because some of the mathematics that shows up there looks like it might be somehow related to quantum … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 31 Comments

Landskepticism

Posted on December 13, 2004 by woit

Tom Banks has a new preprint out, entitled Landskepticism: or Why Effective Potentials Don’t Count String Models. In it he argues against the idea that one can use effective potentials to study the supposed “Landscape” of different vacuum states of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 31 Comments

Nobel Lectures

Posted on December 10, 2004 by woit

The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics gave their Nobel lectures in Stockholm on Wednesday. The lectures of David Gross and Frank Wilczek are available on-line, for some reason that of David Politzer isn’t, at least not yet. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

String Theory, at 20 Explains It All – Not

Posted on December 7, 2004 by woit

This morning’s New York Times has a long and prominently placed article about the 20th anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution”. The Times has a long history of producing overhyped uncritical articles about string theory, for a classic example, see … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 81 Comments