Monthly Archives: April 2011

This Week’s Hype

Posted on April 28, 2011 by woit

This week’s hype comes from an unusual source, John Baez and his ex-student John Huerta, who have a new article in Scientific American entitled The Strangest Numbers in String Theory. The expository article about octonions by John (Baez) that appeared … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 27 Comments

Short Items

Posted on April 27, 2011 by woit

Progress on increasing luminosity at the LHC has been going extremely well, with peak luminosity a few moments ago over 7×1032cm-2s-1. So far integrated luminosity is over 200 pb-1, well on the way to the extremely conservative nominal goal for … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Multiverse Mania | 31 Comments

This Week’s Rumor

Posted on April 21, 2011 by woit

A commenter on the previous posting has helpfully given us the abstract of an internal ATLAS note claiming observation of a resonance at 115 GeV. It’s the sort of thing you would expect to see if there were a Higgs … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Favorite Old Posts | 88 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on April 18, 2011 by woit

This week’s string theory hype is brought to you by a press release headlined Dark Matter and String Theory? from the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, and another one from the Vienna University of Technology. These have led to a BBC … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 34 Comments

No WIMPs

Posted on April 13, 2011 by woit

A commenter points to the long-awaited release of a preprint from the XENON100 experiment giving results from a 100-day run last year. This is the most sensitive dark matter experiment that has released data. The result: with an expected background … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 106 Comments

Short Items

Posted on April 12, 2011 by woit

For a while now the situation with this year’s budget for science in the US has been very unclear, with threats being made of huge cuts to be instituted in the middle of the fiscal year, requiring shutdowns of labs, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

More on Scattering Amplitudes

Posted on April 10, 2011 by woit

Last week was the beginning of a program at the Santa Barbara KITP entitled The Harmony of Scattering Amplitudes which will focus on topics including recent advances in computing N=4 super Yang-Mills scattering amplitudes. Talks are available on-line here. There’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Suspicious Bump

Posted on April 6, 2011 by woit

Last night a new preprint from CDF appeared at the arXiv, discussing a signal observed in their data, at about 3 sigma significance, that could in principle correspond to a new particle not seen or predicted before. This morning’s New … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 20 Comments

2011 Templeton Prize

Posted on April 6, 2011 by woit

This years $1.6 million dollar Templeton Prize has been awarded to astronomer and cosmologist Sir Martin Rees. The Templeton Foundation has traditionally been largely devoted to promoting the intersection of science and religion, so one surprising aspect of this choice … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 23 Comments

The Bogdanov Equation

Posted on April 3, 2011 by woit

Another book that I picked up in Paris is Lubos Motl’s L’Équation Bogdanov: Le secret de l’origine de l’Univers?. It’s a rather weird document, a mish-mash of defense of the Bogdanovs (partly by comparing their ideas favorably to loop quantum … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 18 Comments