Monthly Archives: June 2007

Too Much Good Stuff

Posted on June 30, 2007 by woit

I’ve been finding recently that an increasing serious problems with blogs is that there are too many good ones with material worth reading. I’ve learned quite a lot recently from many well-informed blog postings, but the sheer number of these … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Strings 2007

Posted on June 25, 2007 by woit

Strings 2007 is starting today, and already there seem to be a large number of different laptops connecting to this blog from wlan.uam.es. I’m hoping that some of their owners will write in here with news of how the conference … Continue reading →

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 80 Comments

Assorted News

Posted on June 22, 2007 by woit

Yesterday Sean Carroll and I appeared on the BBC Radio 4 program The Material World, in a segment on String theory – knot good enough?, about the controversy over string theory. The segment started with a piece from the play … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 54 Comments

The Triple-Scoop

Posted on June 15, 2007 by woit

Experimenters at the Tevatron have released data showing the existence of a new baryon, built out of a down, strange and bottom quark, and having a mass of 5.774 +/- .019 GeV. It has been given the name “Ξb“. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Random Collection of Stuff

Posted on June 14, 2007 by woit

Pretty much everybody in the math community seems to be getting a blog. Many of the new bloggers are quite good research mathematicians (including even some Fields Medalists). Two very new ones are: Secret Blogging Seminar: Named after a “Secret … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 34 Comments

US Particle Physics Planning

Posted on June 11, 2007 by woit

Last week both SLAC and Fermilab hosted “Users Meetings”, providing a forum to discuss the current status and future plans of the two laboratories. The SLAC agenda is here, and talks from previous years are available here, with this year’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Dispute Chez Les Physiciens

Posted on June 7, 2007 by woit

Yesterday evening there was a public debate about string theory held in Paris, between Lee Smolin and Thibault Damour. So far, accounts of the debate have appeared in Le Monde and at Fabien Besnard’s blog Mathephysique. The Le Monde article … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 60 Comments

Imposter String Theorist at Stanford

Posted on June 6, 2007 by woit

In recent years many people in the particle theory community have been wondering what’s going on with the Stanford theory group, as it has become dominated by work on things like the anthropic landscape. It turns out that, for a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 41 Comments

All Landscape, All the Time

Posted on June 5, 2007 by woit

There seems to be a peculiar trend going on in the particle theory community. Just about all theorists I talk to, correspond with, argue with on blogs, etc. claim to be quite unhappy with the Landscape, and insist that most … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 87 Comments

Endless Universe

Posted on June 2, 2007 by woit

There’s a new popular book about cosmology now out on bookstore shelves, Endless Universe by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok. The authors are the inventors of a competing model to inflationary cosmology, variously called “ekpyrotic” or “cyclic” cosmology. They describe … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 29 Comments