Monthly Archives: May 2006

Not Even Wrong Available in the UK

Posted on May 31, 2006 by woit

Not Even Wrong, the book, is now available from Amazon in the UK. It’s being published in the British Commonwealth by Jonathan Cape, so should also at some point be available from them in Canada. Last I’d heard official publication … Continue reading →

Posted in Not Even Wrong: The Book | 48 Comments

Accelerator News

Posted on May 27, 2006 by woit

News about various colliders of various vintages: The Tevatron has been shut down for the past two months for maintenance and various improvements. It should start up again this coming week, for latest news on its status, see here. Seed … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 50 Comments

String Theory Makes Prediction – Pig Grows Wings

Posted on May 27, 2006 by woit

Several people have pointed out to me the latest press release hyping the supposed testability of an extremely speculative theoretical idea, which then gets promoted to a “scientists finally find way to test string theory” story, and spread throughout the … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 13 Comments

WordPress Upgrade

Posted on May 23, 2006 by woit

Just upgraded to a new version (2.0.2) of WordPress, and as far as I can tell everything is working normally again. If not, let me know. The one change I plan to make here soon is to try out some … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Wilczek on the Anthropic Principle

Posted on May 21, 2006 by woit

Frank Wilczek has a new Reference Frame piece in this month’s Physics Today. It’s about the question of whether the parameters of our fundamental physical theory are uniquely determined by abstract principles, or “environmental”. He gives two reasons for suspicion … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 199 Comments

Various Links

Posted on May 21, 2006 by woit

Someone wrote in to inform me that Alain Connes has made available at his web-site the full text of his long 1994 book Noncommutative Geometry. This is a rather amazing book, in many ways more of a research document than … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Fantastic Realities

Posted on May 20, 2006 by woit

Frank Wilczek has a new book out, it’s called Fantastic Realities: 49 Mind Journeys and a Trip to Stockholm, and is published by World Scientific. It’s a great read by one of the best in the business for anyone interested … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 4 Comments

Comment on Comments

Posted on May 20, 2006 by woit

Over the last week or so I’ve heard privately from several very different parties with complaints about the comment section here. The general feeling is that it would be more useful and attract more serious contributions if the level of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments

Priority for the Landscape

Posted on May 17, 2006 by woit

The string theory anthropic landscape point of view has now become so widely accepted and entrenched in the particle theory community that various people are making their claims about having had the idea first. The standard first paper that people … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 147 Comments

arXiv Weirdness

Posted on May 16, 2006 by woit

Some rather strange things are going on at the arXiv, especially in the hep-th section: Besides the usual string theory papers, which just get more and more pointless as time goes on, some very weird things have started to appear … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 57 Comments