Monthly Archives: March 2009

Anything Goes

Posted on March 26, 2009 by woit

Yesterday at the KITP Wati Taylor gave a talk entitled Freedom and Constraints in the Landscape of Intersecting/Magnetized Branes. During the talk he explained in detail the problem of lack of predictivity caused by the landscape. As far as anyone … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 26 Comments

The Expanding Universe (of Cosmology Centers)

Posted on March 26, 2009 by woit

The past couple months I’ve seen announcements of the founding of two new cosmology centers at US universities, and I realized that there has been quite a lot of this going on over the past few years here in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Latest Langlands

Posted on March 24, 2009 by woit

The site at UBC collecting the work of Robert Langlands is now no longer being maintained. There’s a new site now at the IAS. It includes some interesting recent short articles of various kinds that I hadn’t seen before, including … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 1 Comment

The Nature of Truth

Posted on March 24, 2009 by woit

Seed Magazine has a video and transcript up of a discussion between cosmologist Paul Steinhardt and philosopher of science Peter Galison advertised as The physicist and the historian discuss the nature of truth as theoretical models of the universe become … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 25 Comments

Collider Smackdowns

Posted on March 21, 2009 by woit

If you’re interested in particle physics and not regularly reading Tommaso Dorigo’s blog, you should be. His latest posting reports on incendiary claims by Michael Dittmar of the CMS collaboration that recent Tevatron Higgs mass limits are wrong and not … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Old Enough for Kindergarten

Posted on March 17, 2009 by woit

Today is the fifth anniversary of the start of this blog, something that has caused me to go back and take a look at some of the early postings, and meditate a bit on what has happened during the past … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 52 Comments

New Higgs Mass Limits

Posted on March 13, 2009 by woit

The new combined CDF/D0 Higgs mass limits are out, there’s a paper here. At a confidence level of 95%, a standard model Higgs is excluded for a mass range between 160 and 170 GeV. At a confidence level of 90%, … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 9 Comments

Twistor Fever

Posted on March 12, 2009 by woit

It’s becoming clear what the hot new topic in particle theory is these days: the use of twistor space methods to try and understand scattering amplitudes in Yang-Mills and gravity theories, especially the maximally supersymmetric versions. This evening on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Particle Fever

Posted on March 12, 2009 by woit

LHC media fever continues this year, with at least three books out or on the way: The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider by Fermilab experimentalist Don Lincoln. Collider: The Search for the Worlds Smallest Particles by Paul Halpern. and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Latest on the Higgs

Posted on March 10, 2009 by woit

The news media are full of stories about the observation at the Tevatron of “single top” production, at a rate consistent with that expected from the Standard Model. There are talks at Fermilab going on about this today, and the … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 11 Comments