Monthly Archives: August 2009

ICM 2010

Posted on August 27, 2009 by woit

The International Congress of Mathematicians is held every four years, and the next iteration, ICM 2010, will be held about a year from now, in Hyderabad, India. These are huge conferences, planned well in advance, with 1465 mathematicians already pre-registered. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments

Percontations

Posted on August 24, 2009 by woit

The Templeton Foundation has recently been sponsoring a series of Bloggingheads diavlogs, under the name Percontations. This week’s episode is Fiddling With the Knobs of the Universe, and it has cosmologist Anthony Aguirre and string theorist Clifford Johnson doing their … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 35 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on August 20, 2009 by woit

Back from a final short summer vacation, with no further travel plans for the indefinite future. Some things I’ve recently come across that might be of interest: Tommaso Dorigo has posted his contribution to a session on “Blogs, big physics … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on August 12, 2009 by woit

From Softpedia this week, the news is of a Universal Theory of the Universe in the Works. According to the article, The theory of quantum mechanics was devised around 1920, and explains all this, but without accounting for gravity. Therefore, … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 15 Comments

25 Years On…

Posted on August 6, 2009 by woit

Five years ago the 20th anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution” was being celebrated, and I wrote some postings about this history (see here, here and here). This month is the quarter-century anniversary, and I haven’t seen any evidence of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments

Various Items

Posted on August 6, 2009 by woit

CERN just issued a press release announcing the decision about the energy for the initial LHC run: 3.5 TeV/beam. The procedure for the 2009 start-up will be to inject and capture beams in each direction, take collision data for a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Back

Posted on August 5, 2009 by woit

I’ve spent most of the last month traveling, first to Latvia and Russia, then to China, finally to Seattle. Back now, looking forward to staying in one time zone and not seeing the interior of a plane for a while. … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Uncategorized | 12 Comments