Author Archives: woit

An article by Steven Weinberg entitled On the Development of Effective Field Theory appeared on the arXiv last night. It’s based on a talk he gave in September, surveys the history of effective field theories and argues for what I’d … Continue reading →

Our semester at Columbia started earlier than usual this year, with first classes this week, my first class yesterday. This semester I’m teaching the second half of a year-long course on the mathematics of quantum mechanics. There’s a Youtube channel … Continue reading →

I first wrote here in 2015 about DAU, the unusual film project based to some extent on the life of Landau. Parts of the film first were shown in Paris early in 2019, and this past year started appearing on … Continue reading →

Almost exactly twenty years ago I started writing a short article about the problems with string theory. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and the timing of entering the twenty-first century seemed appropriate for evaluating … Continue reading →

A few recent items of interest: Martin Greiter has put together a written version of Sidney Coleman’s mid-1990s lecture Quantum Mechanics in Your Face, based on a recording of one version of the lecture and copies of Coleman’s slides. It’s … Continue reading →

In a remarkable article entitled Contemplating the End of Physics posted today at Quanta magazine, Robbert Dijkgraaf (the director of the IAS) more or less announces the arrival of the scenario that John Horgan predicted for physics back in 1996. … Continue reading →

I’ve been spending most of my time recently trying to get unconfused about Euclidean spinor fields, will likely write something here about that in the not too distant future. Some other things that may be of interest: I did an … Continue reading →

Blogging has been light here, since little worthy of note in math/physics has been happening, and I’ve been busy with teaching, freaking out about the election, and trying to better understand Euclidean spinors. I’ll write soon about the Euclidean spinors, … Continue reading →

The 2020 Physics Nobel Prize was announced this morning, with half going to Roger Penrose for his work on black holes, half to two astronomers (Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez) for their work mapping what is going on at the … Continue reading →