Yearly Archives: 2006

Interviews With Atiyah and Gell-Mann

Posted on July 12, 2006 by woit

A correspondent wrote in to tell me about a wonderful web-site, called People’s Archive.  Their idea is to do in-depth interviews at a peer-to-peer level with the great thinkers and creators of our time.  They’ve been doing this for a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on July 6, 2006 by woit

Taking off tomorrow for a long weekend, internet access may be spotty. Here are some things that may be of interest: HEPAP is meeting today and tomorrow, the presentations given at the meeting are available here.  JoAnne Hewett is there … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

String Theory for Undergraduates

Posted on July 5, 2006 by woit

I hadn’t realized how many of the physics departments at the top universities in the US have instituted undergraduate string theory courses.  The only one I was aware of was MIT’s 8.251, String Theory for Undergraduates, taught by Barton Zwiebach, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 119 Comments

Various Weirdness

Posted on July 5, 2006 by woit

Must be something in the air, lots of weird things going on recently: My book has been officially non-endorsed by the people at Axes & Alleys. I finally realized why Lubos was carrying on about how if any errors in … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book, Uncategorized | 29 Comments

Many Worlds In One

Posted on July 2, 2006 by woit

Alex Vilenkin has a new popular book out about cosmology, entitled Many Worlds In One. It’s mainly about the extremely speculative end of cosmology, and much of it is devoted to explaining the author’s ideas on eternal inflation, creating the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 37 Comments

Some Links

Posted on June 29, 2006 by woit

The Cao-Zhu paper at the Asian Journal of Mathematics that is supposed to have a complete proof of the Poincare and geometrization conjectures is still not available, but the introduction to the paper has been posted there. If you’re not … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Zwiebach Letter to the WSJ

Posted on June 29, 2006 by woit

Over at his web-site, Lubos has posted a letter to the Wall Street Journal from Barton Zwiebach. The letter seriously misrepresents the current state of string theory in several ways: string theory is an extraordinarily precise and rigorous framework where … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 59 Comments

Responses To WSJ Article

Posted on June 27, 2006 by woit

The lack of any serious (Lubos doesn’t count) response to my book from string theorists since its appearance in the UK a month or so ago has begun to surprise me a bit. I was also suprised at how weak … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 73 Comments

Talks at Strings 2006 Now Available

Posted on June 26, 2006 by woit

Slides from the talks at Strings 2006 are now available. I’ve spent a little while looking through them today, and am sorry I don’t have time to say much about them. Lots of more or less the same thing as … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Yarn Theory

Posted on June 25, 2006 by woit

A couple people wrote in this morning to tell me about today’s Doonesbury, which features slacker Zipper Harris (who has a blog) trying to impress a woman he last saw in sophomore year of college. He’s still undecided about his … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments