Monthly Archives: September 2017

Various and Sundry

Posted on September 26, 2017 by woit

I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but quite a while ago I replaced the “latexrender” TeX plugin being used here by a mathjax one. As I find time, I’m now going back and editing old posts to get … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory

Posted on September 22, 2017 by woit

For quite a while Leonard Susskind has been giving some wonderful courses on physics under the name “The Theoretical Minimum”, pitched at a level in between typical popularizations and standard advanced undergraduate courses. This is a great idea, since there … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 30 Comments

QCD at $\theta=\pi$

Posted on September 15, 2017 by woit

Earlier this week Zohar Komargodski (who is now at the Simons Center) visited Columbia, and gave a wonderful talk on recent work he has been involved in that provides some new insight into a very old question about QCD. Simplifying … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Modern Theories of Quantum Gravity

Posted on September 7, 2017 by woit

Quanta magazine today has a column by Robbert Dijkgraaf that comes with the abstract: Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Modern Geometry

Posted on September 4, 2017 by woit

This semester I’m teaching the first semester of Modern Geometry, our year-long course on differential geometry aimed at our first-year Ph.D. students. A syllabus and some other information about the course is available here. In the spring semester Simon Brendle … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments