Monthly Archives: June 2004

Some of the talks given at the Lattice 2004 conference are now available on-line. Particularly interesting is Kenneth Wilson’s historical talk about his roles in the development of the renormalization group and of lattice gauge theory. He also refers to … Continue reading →

It seems that the Fermilab Tevatron is a quite sensitive detector for earthquakes. According to the Accelerator Update for yesterday, a small earthquake in Illinois caused the machine to lose its beam and a superconducting magnet to quench. A few … Continue reading →

Two of the year’s largest particle theory conferences are taking place around now, with Lattice 2004 attracting 280 physicists to Batavia, Illinois this past week and Strings 2004 drawing almost 500 to Paris starting tomorrow. Normally I feel kind of … Continue reading →

Just got the following e-mail: Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 19:40:58 +0200 From: fau.alex (fau.alex@wanadoo.fr) To: woit@cpw.math.columbia.edu Subject: Mr Woit hi, I am a french student and I will go in 1re(in France) the next year and I want to … Continue reading →

The KITP at Santa Barbara seems to be going all out to hype claims of observability by LIGO of effects of cosmic strings. The front page of the KITP website prominently features the story, and adds the personal phone numbers … Continue reading →

After an expensive upgrade to increase its luminosity, the Tevatron at Fermilab was turned back on in March 2001 to start “Run II”, during which it was hoped that the machine would run with a dramatically higher luminosity than during … Continue reading →

There’s a quite remarkable article by Barry Mazur in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the AMS. It brings together ideas about elliptic curves and deformations of Galois representations that were used by Wiles to prove Fermat’s last theorem, … Continue reading →

At an early stage in the Los Alamos preprint archive it was split up into hep-th (for more formal or speculative work not directly relevant to experiment) and hep-ph (for “phenomenological” papers directly related to experiment). Susskind has just come … Continue reading →

Recently I’ve been reading a new book, The Evidence for the Top Quark, by a philosopher of science named Kent Staley. It’s a combination of a history of the CDF collaboration’s work leading up to their claim to have discovered … Continue reading →