Monthly Archives: October 2009

Perfect Rigor

Posted on October 30, 2009 by woit

I just finished reading author Masha Gessen’s new book about Grigori Perelman, Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. It’s a short but very well done account of the life of Grigori Perelman, how he came … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 28 Comments

Short Mathematical Items

Posted on October 29, 2009 by woit

Riemann submitted his paper on the Riemann Hypothesis October 19, 1859, and it was read by Kummer at the meeting of the Berlin academy on November 3. AIM is organizing a celebration of the 150th birthday of the Riemann Hypothesis, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

News from HEPAP

Posted on October 27, 2009 by woit

Last week there was a meeting of HEPAP held in Washington, presentations are available here. HEP has done very well recently in recent US federal government budgets, due to the stimulus and large deficit spending going on to fight the … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 2 Comments

Latest from the LHC

Posted on October 25, 2009 by woit

This weekend successful tests of injection of a beam from the SPS into the LHC were performed. The beam only traveled through a few of the sectors before being dumped, since all sectors of the machine are not yet ready … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 5 Comments

Master of the Universe

Posted on October 24, 2009 by woit

A couple days ago I got an odd phone call, from a reporter at the Guardian, asking me to comment on the appointment of Michael Green as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge. I told the reporter that I wasn’t a really … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 28 Comments

Physicists Calculate Alternative Universes

Posted on October 22, 2009 by woit

According to a story in the Stanford Daily, the recent arXiv preprint mentioned here and discussed many other places on the web has given us two new scientific celebrities: Two of Stanford’s physicists, Professor Andrei Linde and postdoctoral researcher Vitaly … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 26 Comments

Higgs, Dark Matter and Supersymmetry: what the LHC will tell us

Posted on October 19, 2009 by woit

The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing is holding a New Horizons in Science conference right now in Austin. This morning Steven Weinberg gave a talk, now available online, with the title Higgs, dark matter and supersymmetry, what the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

Short Items

Posted on October 17, 2009 by woit

There’s a wonderful new research mathematics site: Math Overflow. For some discussion of it, see here and here. For yet another wonderful new site about research mathematics, there’s the French Images des Mathématiques. Why is there nothing in theoretical physics … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Nielsen-Ninomiya and the arXiv

Posted on October 14, 2009 by woit

Because of the New York Times article discussed here, four recent papers by Nielsen and Ninomiya have been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Pretty much all of it has been unremittingly hostile, when not convinced that these … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 20 Comments

Embarrassing Crackpottery

Posted on October 12, 2009 by woit

A while back I noticed that the arXiv had allowed the posting of the preprint Card game restriction in LHC can only be successful!, yet another in a sequence of crackpot articles about the LHC from Holger-Bech Nielsen and Masao … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 51 Comments