Theoretical Physics Slop

Posted on December 9, 2025 by woit

In recent years I’ve been struggling with depressive thoughts whenever I think about what’s been going on in the field of fundamental theoretical physics research. As an example of what I find depressing, today I learned that the Harvard Physics department has not only a Harvard Swampland Initiative, but also a Gravity, Space-Time, and Particle Physics (GRASP) Initiative, which this week is hosting a conference celebrating 25 years of Randall-Sundrum. Things at my alma mater are very different than during my student years, which lacked “Initiatives”, but featured Glashow, Weinberg, Coleman, Witten and many others doing amazing things.

For those too young to remember, Randall-Sundrum refers to large extra dimension models that were heavily overhyped around the end of the last millennium. These led to ridiculous things like NYT stories about how Physicists Finally Find a Way To Test Superstring Theory, as well as concerns that the LHC was going to destroy the universe by producing black holes. At the time 25 years ago, hearing this nonsense was really annoying. I had assumed that it was long dead, but no, zombie theoretical physics ideas it seems are all the rage, at Harvard and elsewhere.

One consolation of recent years has been that I figured things really couldn’t get much worse. Today though, I realized that such thoughts were highly naive. A few days ago Steve Hsu announced that Physics Letters B has published an article based on original work by GPT5 (arXiv version here). Jonathan Oppenheim has taken a look and after a while realized the paper was nonsense (explained here). He writes:

The rate of progress is astounding. About a year ago, AI couldn’t count how many R’s in strawberry, and now it’s contributing incorrect ideas to published physics papers. It is actually incredibly exciting, to see the pace of development. But for now the uptick in the volume of papers is noticeable, and getting louder, and we’re going to be wading through a lot of slop in the near term. Papers that pass peer review because they look technically correct. Results that look impressive because the formalism is sophisticated. The signal-to-noise ratio in science is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

The history of the internet is worth remembering : we were promised wisdom and universal access to knowledge, and we got some of that, but we also got conspiracy theories and misinformation at unprecedented scale.

AI will surely do exactly this to science. It will accelerate the best researchers but also amplify the worst tendencies. It will generate insight and bullshit in roughly equal measure.

Welcome to the era of science slop!

Given the sad state of affairs in this field before automated science slop generation came along, I think Oppenheim is being far too optimistic. There currently is no mechanism to recognize and suppress bullshit in this area, together with strong pressures to produce more bullshit. I hope that I’m wrong, but I fear we’re about to be inundated with a tsunami of slop which will bury the field completely.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Whatever Happened to String Theory?

Posted on November 15, 2025 by woit

Gayoung Lee at Gizmodo today has responses to the question Whatever Happened to String Theory?.

Carlo Rovelli and I give the obvious and accurate answer that it’s a failed idea, explaining why. The other answers exhibit the sad state of continuing denial in many quarters of the reality of the situation:

  • Science communicator Daniel Whiteson, an experimentalist who doesn’t appear to know anything about string theory, assures the public that the problem is just that we can’t yet test it.
  • John Schwarz is completely delusional: “A large portion of the theoretical particle physics community is now convinced that we are on the right track to discovering the correct unified theory of our universe (and many naysayers have repented).”
  • Thomas Van Riet, whose main claim to fame is vigorously hyping string theory on Twitter, also does the job here.
  • Hiroshi Ooguri gives an absurd argument that one should ignore 40 years of utter failure, since “it would take 1,250 years to construct a realistic model of the universe from string theory and another 1,000 years to verify it experimentally.”
  • Cumrun Vafa turns up the hype machine to 11, claiming that “the large-scale cosmological observation and the small-scale tabletop experiments are both on their way to confirming string theory predictions.” (the bogus “predictions” are from his latest “string-motivated model”).

The past few days have also seen another “string theory is doing fine” PR effort, Marika Taylor’s String theory: scientists are trying new ways to verify the idea that could unite all of physics. Here the hype is about string theory vindication from dark energy measurements, black hole gravitational wave measurements, and something about quantum computing.

It became clear long ago that writing careful explanations of exactly what was wrong with this kind of hype is a waste of time. There’s no point in arguing with the people making up the industry generating this nonsense since they simply don’t care whether what they are writing is true or not. For many years it seemed to me that the effort to try and fight this was still worthwhile, because if unchecked it was going to lead to the intellectual death of the subject of fundamental physical theory, together with massive discrediting of scientific research in general among the public who traditionally held science in high esteem. Unfortunately that fight has now been lost, with the depressing consequences that surround us all.

As for what to do about it, articles like Taylor’s claiming “right now, things are looking up for string theory” are just digging the hole that needs to be climbed out of deeper. I’m personally optimistic about some new ideas in fundamental physical theory, trying to concentrate on pushing them forward and getting them written up. I’m not optimistic though about seeing this part of the scientific enterprise return to a healthy subject in the forseeable future.

Posted in This Week's Hype | 51 Comments

Some Math/Physics Items

Posted on October 25, 2025 by woit

A few quick math/physics items (OK, mostly math…):

  • Contributions to next year’s ICM have already been written up by many speakers, and posted on the arXiv. Try this link to find them.
  • There’s a wonderful new result from Kevin Costello that he talks about here. A central part of our understanding of the Standard Model is the computation of the beta-function of QCD. The beta-function determines the running of the effective strong coupling with energy, and this has been convincingly tested in many processes over a wide range of energy scales.

    The usual way of calculating this is a Feynman diagram calculation that can be found in any QFT textbook that shows how to do calculations in gauge theory. Costello explains how to get the result in a very different way, using the self-dual theory, twistor space, and the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem.

  • There’s a new volume of articles in honor of Gerard Laumon (who passed away on October 4) about algebraic geometry and the Langlands program, available at this website.
  • On the Peter Scholze front, in this interview he explains in general terms some of the fundamental ideas he has been pursuing in his recent research, including the motivation of finding new ideas about geometry to describe Spec Z.

    This semester at Bonn, he’s pursuing a project of generalizing geometry (lecture notes in progress here) by defining and studying “Gestalten”, which are supposed to be a new sort of geometric object, for which there is “a perfect duality between geometry and algebra!”

    For a nice write-up about Scholze’s work on a geometrization of real local Langlands, see here.

    At the late March 2026 Seminaire Bourbaki, Scholze will be lecturing on “Geometric Langlands, after Gaitsgory, Raskin, … “

Update: Both the Clay Mathematics Institute in Oxford and the CMSA at Harvard have organized talks about the Millenium problems to celebrate their 25th anniversary. The Clay Math talks are here. CMSA so far has had talks on Poincare (Mike Freedman) and the Yang-Mills mass gap (Sourav Chatterjee). Next up: Pierre Deligne on the Hodge Conjecture.

Posted in Langlands, Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Chen-Ning (Frank) Yang 1922-2025

Posted on October 19, 2025 by woit

Chen-Ning Yang (often known in the US as “Frank”) passed away in Beijing yesterday at the age of 103. He was the last of the great figures of 1950s high-energy particle physics still with us.

His name is associated with two of the central ideas of what was to become the Standard Model.

  • In 1953, together with Robert Mills, he wrote down the extension of the theory of quantum electrodynamics from the the case of gauge group U(1) to that of SU(2).
  • In 1956, together with T.D. Lee, he argued that the weak interaction theory should (very unexpectedly) be one that violated parity conservation.

The original Yang-Mills theory was supposed to describe the strong interactions, with SU(2) isospin symmetry. This idea doesn’t work, but later on the SU(2) Yang-Mills theory became the foundation of the unified electroweak theory. Extending from SU(2) to SU(3), one gets the rest of the Standard Model, QCD.

The problem with Yang-Mills theory in the 1950s was that, treated perturbatively, the photon of QED gets replaced by a triplet of spin 1 massless particles, but there is no such thing in nature. Unlike the photon case, this triplet will have self-interactions, and the hope from the beginning was that these would explain away the lack of massless particles. One way to get rid of the massless particles is the Anderson-Higgs mechanism, first described by Anderson in 1962. For Anderson and others working on this, the hope was to use a spontaneously broken SU(2) gauge theory to describe the strong interactions. Only later, in 1967, was this idea applied to unified electroweak models.

The other way to get rid of the massless particles is to realize that while the quantum Yang-Mills theory is asymptotically free at short distances (where massless states are relevant), at long distances the self-interactions become large and the spectrum of the theory has only massive confined states. Moving from SU(2) isospin symmetry to SU(3) color symmetry, one finally got (1973) a very successful Yang-Mills type theory of the strong interactions.

While the Yang-Mills proposal for the strong interactions took 20 years to come to fruition, things happened very differently with the Lee-Yang proposal of parity non-conservation. Lee and Yang submitted their paper about this on June 22, 1956. At the time Yang was visiting Brookhaven for the summer, coming into New York to work with Lee. A good place to read about this is here (with more here), which has:

Yang did not remember precisely how the idea of examining the previous experiments on weak interactions came to him and Lee, but he remembers when and where. It was early in May, and it occurred just after he had driven in to New York from Upton to visit Lee. He had picked up Lee at his Columbia office and was having difficulty finding a parking place near Columbia. He and Lee were driving around looking for one and talking. They finally parked the car temporarily in front of a Chinese restaurant near the corner of Broadway and 125th Street. The restaurant was not yet open, so they went into the White Rose Café nearby. They sat down at a table and resumed their conversation, and it was then that the idea struck them. It was suddenly clear to them that the results of one weak-interaction experiment after another had to be examined to see if they gave any information on parity non-conservation.

A Columbia colleague, Chien-Shiung Wu, soon started an experiment using cobalt-60 and had experimentally demonstrated parity non-conservation by December. Another Columbia group with a muon beam quickly showed parity non-conservation in that context. Not much more than a year after their paper, Lee and Yang received the physics Nobel Prize for 1957. This was definitely a high point for the Columbia physics department.

In 1966 Yang left Princeton for Stony Brook, where he founded the Institute for Theoretical Physics. By the time I arrived there much later as a postdoc (1984), Yang was very much an elder statesman of the field. I only remember talking to him a couple times, both not about science but about administrative issues.

The ITP shared a building with the math department, which had become a world center for geometry starting with the arrival of Jim Simons in 1968. It’s fascinating to hear (see here) the account by Simons and Yang of their attempts to understand each other’s language and their slow realization that the gauge fields of Yang-Mills theory were the geometer’s connections on a principal fiber bundle. Yang wrote a paper with Wu giving what became known as the “Wu-Yang” dictionary relating the two subjects. Singer learned of this when visiting Stony Brook, then brought the news to Atiyah in Oxford, starting an explosive development during the late 1970s.

Yang retired in 1999 and returned to Beijing. In recent years he has been involved in debates over whether China should build a new large collider, taking a rather skeptical view. For an extensive discussion of this, see here. Already in 1980 (see here) Yang had come to the conclusion that particle physics was not going to again see anything like what had happened in 1956: “the party’s over”.

So, on the spur of the moment, I said to Marshak, “Yes, I will say something, if you promise not to publish it.”

He said OK, and he stuck to his word later.

So I said, “In the next ten years, I think the title of the panel was either the future or the next ten years of high-energy physics,” I said, “In the next ten years, the most important discovery in high-energy physics is that ‘the party’s over’.” After I said that, there was general silence. Nobody said a word, and then Marshak declared the panel was finished.

I fear that developments since 1980 have very much proved Yang right. While the party’s over, his passing provides a good opportunity to recall what a fine time it was.

Posted in Obituaries | 19 Comments

The Situation at Columbia XXXIV

Posted on October 17, 2025 by woit

I’m trying to not get distracted from finishing writing up notes on some new ideas about Wick rotation, but here’s some news from Vichy-on-Hudson.

Jonathan Cole, who was provost from 1989 to 2003, has written an excellent letter to the president, provost and trustees. It makes specific recommendations about how they could start showing some courage and stand up to the dictatorship.

It is time for Columbia’s acting President Claire Shipman, Provost Angela Olinto, and the board of trustees to demonstrate their courage and empathy. It requires courage to stand up to President Donald Trump’s administration and its efforts to destroy our greatest institutions of higher learning; but courage can also be shown in admitting that you’ve made a mistake.

I don’t think they’ll take his advice, but would love to be wrong about this.

The campus remains locked-down, with highest administration priority ensuring that there is no protest of Israeli government policies on the campus. While there were two days of memorials on the central campus for Israeli victims of the October 7 massacre, no such memorials for Palestinian victims of the Gaza conflict have been allowed.

On the question of what faculty members are allowed to say about the Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide, we’ve been told that we can attend an in-person only event on Monday, where a university lawyer will tell us what we can say and what we can’t say.

Scott Aaronson was recently on campus, delivering a talk on Computational Complexity and Explanations in Physics, an experience he describes here. I was out of town then, but in any case this sort of approach to fundamental physics doesn’t intersect in any way with my interests in the subject.

Scott was very pleased to see the lockdown and that Columbia now shares his highest priority of putting a stop to pro-Palestinian student protests at any costs. I’m glad to see that he’s now satisfied and, unlike in the past, will no longer tell Jewish students not to come to Columbia.

There are a couple things in Scott’s post that simply are not true:

  • About the idea that “the measures seem to be needed, since every time the university has tried to relax them, the “intifada” has returned, with non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching”, this is delusional nonsense with no basis in reality.
  • He writes that I have called him “a mentally ill genocidal fascist.” I’d like to make it clear that I think he’s not a Fascist, but a Fascist collaborator. And quite a successful one at that: allying with the destruction of US democracy to get what you want has worked out well for him and others who are intensely disturbed by any support for the Palestinians in their conflict with the Israeli government.

About recent developments in Gaza, I’m very pleased to see that Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire, and the number of people getting killed each day has been reduced dramatically. Such a ceasefire is very welcome now, should have taken place long ago, back when the students were allowed to protest in favor of it. It seems to me that two factors have been responsible for stopping the killing (at least for now):

  • The genocidal nature of the Israeli campaign, which was clear to the student protesters early on, has become clear to the rest of the world. Besides the awful facts on the ground, reading things like this from Scott (where he argues that Zionism is now fundamentally about being willing to kill Palestinian children while giving the finger to the rest of the world), has opened most people’s eyes to what has been happening.
  • Trump and his administration deserve credit for doing something no other US administration has been willing to do: apply pressure on Netanyahu to stop killing Palestinians. Whatever the motivation for this is, it’s great that it has finally happened.

I have no idea what will happen next in Gaza, and don’t want to host a discussion of what has happened, is happening, or will happen there. Insightful comments about the Columbia aspect of this story are welcome though.

Posted in The Situation at Columbia | 12 Comments

The Situation at Columbia XXXIII

Posted on September 21, 2025 by woit

The fall semester is now under way at Columbia, and in many ways things are normal: enrollments are as usual or higher, foreign students have mostly gotten visas and are on campus. There are some new things though which are very different.

The temporary card tables and tents housing the security at the gates have been replaced by permanent guard houses. The lockdown is no longer temporary but permanent. People have started referring to the main gate at 116th and Broadway as “Checkpoint Charlie”. Throughout much of the day people are lined up waiting to show their papers (a QR code). There’s additional security at most of the building entrances.

Once you get on campus, the place is as peaceful and beautiful as always. The vibe is not East Berlin but Vichy-on-Hudson. Lots of security people around. The Columbia administration had the flags lowered to honor Charlie Kirk. The Barnard president has a piece in the New York Times arguing that colleges need to host more speakers like Charlie Kirk.

The large video screens on campus intended for announcements often urge one to “Report a Concern” in order to “Help Prevent Discrimination and Harassment”. The screen has a large QR code which takes you to a page where you can report students for “behavioral misconduct”, specifically for “violations stemming from demonstrations and protests”. You can also report anyone for “Discrimination and Discriminatory Harassment”. These reports go to the “Office of Institutional Equity” which opens investigations. What I’ve heard from people this has happened to is: you don’t get told who reported you, have to hire a lawyer and will be under investigation for months, unable to tell anyone what is going on.

We were also recently told that to get hired at Columbia in the past you needed to report if you had been investigated and sanctioned, now you need to report if you’ve ever been investigated, even if the investigation determined you did nothing wrong.

Since no one knows what the OIE is doing and no one knows what might cause someone to report that you’re an “antisemite”, conversations about many topics now only happen behind closed doors with people you trust, or on encrypted messaging channels. Instructors and students in some areas no longer know what it is safe to say so are keeping quiet. Courses are being cancelled (for example Rashid Khalidi’s) and syllabi have been rewritten to avoid problematic topics.

The Trump administration remains devoted to the project of deporting Columbia students like Mahmoud Khalil, and the university appears to have a policy of not in any way helping him by publicly objecting to such deportations.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, large numbers of innocent civilians are being killed daily. The population of Gaza City is being driven from their homes, which are then flattened to make sure they can’t ever come back. If they survive the trip, they’ll be concentrated in camps and face an unclear future (one suggestion is that they’ll be offered the opportunity to “voluntarily” leave Gaza and never come back).

We’re told the reason for the massive security apparatus and reporting system is to “keep us safe”, but the only thing it appears to be designed to keep us safe from is from hearing any criticism on campus of the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide. So far it’s working.

Update: The Columbia Spectator has an article about the Rosenbury op-ed, which was initially headlined “Charlie Kirk Challenged College Students. We Need More Like Him.” Philosophy professor Taylor Carman comments:

On a more conciliatory note, I agree with President Rosenbury’s warning that ‘higher education is under attack from within.’

I probably disagree with her, however, about where that attack is coming from.

Update: The AAUP has released a report On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom. It ends with seven recommendations for what universities should be doing and should not be doing. By my count, the Columbia trustees and administration are violating all seven of the recommendations.

Update: If you are a local resident who needs to go through the campus to get to your home, Columbia has a process to get you a QR code: you hire a lawyer, who sends a letter to the Columbia general counsel threatening a lawsuit.

Posted in The Situation at Columbia | 6 Comments

Two Number Theory Items (and Woody Allen)

Posted on September 20, 2025 by woit
  • James Douglas Boyd has recently spent a lot of time interacting with Mochizuki and others at RIMS working in anabelian geometry. Material from interviews he conducted are available here (Mochizuki on IUT) and here (on anabelian geometry at RIMS). He also has written a summary of IUT and of the basic problem with the abc proof. These include detailed comments on the issue pointed out by Scholze-Stix and why this is a significant problem for the proof. I’d be curious to hear from anyone who has looked at this closely about whether they agree with Boyd’s characterization of the situation.

    There’s also a lot of material the IUT ideas, independent of the problematic abc proof, and about what Mochizuki and others are now trying to do with these ideas.

  • Videos from the talks at the conference last month in honor of Manin are now available here. I was especially interested in Dustin Clausen’s talk on Weil groups and ideas about how to go beyond the conventional definition to get something more satisfactory. The twistor line makes an appearance.
  • From a story in today’s Wall Street Journal about Woody Allen and his new novel:

    Though he’s already at work on a second novel, he rarely reads fiction—“I feel like I’m wasting time.” More often he reads philosophy and books by physicists. “I keep thinking I’m going to learn something of deep value that’s going to make me feel better in life,” he says. “It never does.”

Update: A commenter points to this from Mochizuki, which denounces Boyd and his report, as well as discussing prospects for formalizing IUT and the abc proof.

Update: Kirti Joshi has a new FAQ about the proof of the abc-conjecture. He has also sent me this letter, which more about his view.

Posted in abc Conjecture, Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

Posted on September 11, 2025 by woit

For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the context of “epistemic collapse”: the collapse of a shared reality, caused by the loss of reliable sources for distinguishing what is true from what is false.). The Wall Street Journal has a new article entitled The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’ with summary:

Streamers are building huge audiences by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment. Scientists are starting to worry about the consequences.

If you replaced “Streamers” by “Sabine Hossenfelder” this would be reasonably accurate, and a serious discussion of this would have been interesting and worthwhile. Instead, the article is an excellent example of the sort of epistemic collapse we’re now living in. There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone.

I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless (and I’m trying to improve my mental health this week, not make it worse). Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle.

Maybe some day our information environment will become healthy again, but for now I’m not sure what to do about this. Be aware that if you’re trying to understand the state of fundamental theoretical physics, watching Joe Rogan, Piers Morgan, Professor Dave, etc. podcasts is just going to fill your mind with crap. Reading articles about these podcasts is worse. If a podcaster (e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder) has a book, read the book (Lost in Math is pretty good) rather than watching the podcasts. In general, reading books is a good idea (I can also recommend this one).

Update: John Baez comments here:

This quagmire is getting bigger. It’s another part of what William Gibson recently called the Singularity of Stupid.

Update: If you want more drama, Sabine Hossenfelder here explains how, after she described someone’s research as “bullshit”, that person went to one place where she has an official (but unpaid) affiliation (the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) and convinced them to fire her. Anyway, that’s her story, maybe there’s more to it, but it’s highly plausible. Knowing Sabine and the sort of work she criticizes, I have no doubt that the research really was bullshit. If there really was someone going to the Munich Center to do this, it would be interesting to know who it was.

I (unusually) watched the whole video, and everything she said seemed to me completely sensible. Those who have swallowed the story that she’s an unethical deranged conspiracy theorist might want to instead look into the ethics of those who disagree with her.

Posted in Uncategorized | 77 Comments

Bad Craziness

Posted on August 28, 2025 by woit

Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I was very wrong.

In his latest blog posting, he explains that the current situation in Gaza is analogous to an evil murderer kidnapping your child and strapping her to train tracks before an oncoming train. If you pull a lever to divert the train it will instead kill five of the murderer’s children. This situation provides for him a definition of Zionism:

Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob…

Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have.

Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.

Update: More from Scott, it seems that those opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza are “brain-eaten zombies”. He’s also convinced that the zombie problem is mainly academics in the humanities. I hear that there’s a statement about what is going on in Gaza signed by thousands of prominent scientists that will soon be made public. A lot of very prominent brain-eaten zombie scientists out there, it seems.

Of course he’s still not allowing comments on his blog. For other discussion of his blogposts, see here and here.

Update: I’ve deleted quite a few comments from people who wanted to tell me that there was no genocide going on in Gaza (and if there was, it was the faulty of the Palestinians). Yesterday the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution (by an 86% majority vote) characterizing the Israeli actions in Gaza as genocide.

Update: More from Scott about how victimized he is, especially by some troll (see here) sending him an anti-semitic graphic that he then put up on his website as “woitwordview”. He seems to agree with me that he is “psychologically troubled”, but sees the fact that almost everyone is telling him this as indicating that “all the moral progress of humanity depends on psychologically troubled people” like himself.

For some idea of what is going on here as classes start, take a look here, here, here and here.

Just saw this from the university. Trying to figure out what it’s about, it seems that a couple students walked through campus holding a sign saying “some of your classmates were IOF criminals committing genocide in Palestine”.

I’ve recently decided that, in order not to become as psychologically troubled as Scott, I need to get out of here and detox for a while. Leaving for a week-long trip to Paris tomorrow, now shutting down comments here. Will try to spend more time thinking about Wick rotation, and less about Columbia and things like whether someone in the IDF read Scott’s “Deep Zionism” post and decided to do this, or the slaughter going on in Gaza that we’re not supposed to say anything about.

Posted in Uncategorized | 90 Comments

The Situation at Columbia XXXII

Posted on August 25, 2025 by woit

Actually, nothing really new at Columbia. New students arriving, classes start next week. Still tight security at the gates and the administration’s highest priority is to continue to ensure that no “antisemitic” protest of the war crimes going on in Gaza occurs on this campus. Some people here think this is great, some are appalled, most just don’t care.

I don’t think there’s anyone now unaware of the ongoing wholesale killing of innocents going on in Gaza as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to drive the Palestinians from that land. The trustees and administration of Columbia know what is going on and have made their decision about their role in it.

In case you think this description of what is happening in Gaza is just the misguided opinion of one particular “antisemitic piece of shit”, here’s a clear explanation of what is going on from a New York Times commentator not known to be an “antisemitic piece of shit”:

I will leave it to historians to debate whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. But what is absolutely clear to me right now is that this Israeli government is committing suicide, homicide and fratricide.

It is destroying Israel’s standing in the world, it is killing Gazan civilians with seemingly no regard for innocent human life, and it is tearing apart Israeli society and world Jewry, between those Jews who want to still stand with Israel no matter what and those who can no longer tolerate, explain or justify where this Israeli government is taking the Jewish state and now want to distance themselves from it….

It is one thing for a country at war to justify collateral damage when going after the enemy’s top leaders. It is something entirely more sinister when you are killing and wounding dozens of civilians to try to kill, say, the deputy to the deputy commander.

It is also devious and sinister when you use your military to move hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians from one part of Gaza to the other — under the guise of evacuating them from fighting zones — and then deliberately bulldoze the homes they left behind for no real military reason but with the clear ulterior motive of making life so miserable for them that they will leave the area entirely. And it is shameful when you stop and start humanitarian aid, with the hope that people will get hungry enough to leave.

But as I said, this is not just homicide pure and simple; it is also suicide and fratricide. Israel is now well on its way to making itself a pariah state.

Update: The IDF has explained what they did yesterday at Nasser Hospital, killing at least 20 people including many journalists and health care workers. They identified a camera taking pictures from a building, were well aware that it was a hospital building. A tank shell was fired at the part of the building where the camera was, killing at least one person near the camera. They then waited ten minutes, until first responders and journalists had gathered at the site where the person was killed, and launched another shell, which is the one that killed a large number of journalists and health care workers.

The camera the IDF was targeting was a Reuters camera.

Shelling a hospital with a tank because a camera is there? Then shelling the hospital again to kill those who responded to try and help the killed and injured? It doesn’t get much more war-crimey than that, and this is what Israel is doing every day to the population of Gaza. It’s also what the Columbia administration is going all out to stop anyone from protesting about on campus.

Posted in The Situation at Columbia | 41 Comments