Yearly Archives: 2007

Witten on 2+1 Dimensional Gravity

Posted on May 6, 2007 by woit

The high point of Friday’s string cosmology workshop here in New York was Witten’s lecture on his new ideas about 2+1 dimensional quantum gravity. I’ll try and reproduce here what I understood from the lecture, but this (2+1 d quantum … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 29 Comments

All Sorts of Stuff

Posted on May 5, 2007 by woit

For up-to-the-minute news about the Higgs, far better informed than any media source could ever be (and thus a great example of why blogs are changing the way the media works), your best bet is Tommaso Dorigo’s blog. His latest … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Princeton Physicists Connect String Theory With Established Physics

Posted on May 2, 2007 by woit

The latest press release hyping a string theory paper in a misleading way comes from my alma mater Princeton, which I find quite depressing. According to yesterday’s press release, entitled Princeton physicists connect string theory with established physics: String theory, … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 29 Comments

Three String Theory Textbooks

Posted on May 2, 2007 by woit

Until very recently, someone who wanted to begin studying string theory seriously had really only three possible textbooks available: Superstring Theory (1987), by Green, Schwarz and Witten. This is a two-volume, massive 1000 page treatment of the quantization of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 20 Comments

Various Events and Other News

Posted on April 29, 2007 by woit

Upcoming events in and around New York, including several I’m planning to attend: The New York Academy of Sciences is having an evening of lectures this Wednesday, hosted by Frank Wilczek, on the topic of Expanding Frontiers of Physics and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 57 Comments

Witten on Gauge Symmetry Breaking for Mathematicians

Posted on April 25, 2007 by woit

Edward Witten has a new expository article, aimed at mathematicians, to appear at some point in the Bulletin of the AMS, but now available here. It’s based on colloquium-style lectures to mathematicians he has given over the last few years … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

News From the Landscape and Elsewhere

Posted on April 17, 2007 by woit

At the big annual APS meeting, now going on in Jacksonville, of the 9 plenary talks, one is about particle theory. The talk is entitled “String Theory, Branes and if You Wish, the Anthropic Principle” and it was given by … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 147 Comments

String Kings – The Director’s Cut

Posted on April 13, 2007 by woit

I just learned from Cosmic Variance that a review of the Director’s Cut version of String Kings is now out. It seems that the Director’s Cut version includes more scenes featuring a certain “man on the edge” in New York … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

MiniBooNE Results

Posted on April 11, 2007 by woit

I won’t bother to write up something about the background of today’s MiniBooNE results, since Tommaso Dorigo has already done a better job than I ever could. He also provides a link to where the live feed of the seminar … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 62 Comments

Math and Physics Roundup

Posted on April 10, 2007 by woit

The latest “This Week’s Finds” by John Baez discusses Felix Klein and his “Erlanger Programm”, which essentially was the idea that geometry should be understood as the study of Lie groups G, their subgroups H, and coset spaces G/H. This, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments