Monthly Archives: May 2009

No Landscape and No Math in Rome

Posted on May 29, 2009 by woit

Strings 2009 is about three weeks away, and it will bring 450 or so string theorists to Rome. The topics of the talks at the Strings 200x conferences give a good idea of what the hot topics in the field … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Role Reversal

Posted on May 29, 2009 by woit

It used to be that New Scientist had somewhat of a reputation for publishing misleading articles about speculative physics, and Science News was a more stodgy but reliable publication that stuck to serious physics. Recently there has been a role … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 2 Comments

Singer Birthday Conference

Posted on May 28, 2009 by woit

Last weekend I was up in Cambridge attending the conference in honor of Is Singer’s 85th birthday. Singer has had a very long and distinguished career in mathematics, much of it at MIT, where he arrived as one of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Latest on the LHC

Posted on May 28, 2009 by woit

The Resonaances blog has a report from Planck 2009 on a talk about the status of the LHC. The slides of the talk explain the problems with training quenches that have necessitated initially running the machine at 5 TeV per … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 4 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on May 21, 2009 by woit

HEPAP is meeting in Washington today, talks starting to become available here. Things are very different now than in past years, with huge budget increases for all areas of HEP at the NSF and DOE. FQXI has awarded quite a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Why Colliders Have Two Detectors

Posted on May 20, 2009 by woit

Last year the D0 collaboration at the Tevatron published a claim of first observation of an Ωb particle (a baryon containing one bottom and two strange quarks), with a significance of 5.4 sigma and a mass of 6165 +/- 16.4 … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 12 Comments

Feynman Diagrams and Beyond

Posted on May 16, 2009 by woit

The Spring 2009 IAS newsletter is out, available online here. It includes the news that the IAS is stealing yet another physics faculty member from Harvard, with Matias Zaldarriaga moving there in the fall. The cover story of the newsletter … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Austria May Leave CERN

Posted on May 12, 2009 by woit

I mentioned this here when I first heard about it, but by now more information is available. Last Thursday the Austrian government announced their intention to withdraw from membership in CERN, effective late 2010. This decision still needs to be … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 17 Comments

New York Events

Posted on May 12, 2009 by woit

I’m afraid that most of you have already missed one event here in New York involving someone who blogs about high energy physics. This was Tommaso Dorigo’s visit this Sunday to New York for a few hours. Luckily for you, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Spinning the Superweb

Posted on May 12, 2009 by woit

Oswaldo Zapata is a young string theorist who recently got his Ph.D. in the subject in Rome. He recently wrote to me to tell me about some essays on the history of superstring theory that he has written, which he … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments