Author Archives: woit

Funding Priorities

Posted on August 26, 2020 by woit

The research that gets done in any field of science is heavily influenced by the priorities set by those who fund the research. For science in the US in general, and the field of theoretical physics in particular, recent years … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 36 Comments

Guys and Their Theories of Everything

Posted on August 21, 2020 by woit

I’m a big fan of Sabine Hossenfelder’s music videos, the latest of which, Theories of Everything, has recently appeared. I also agree with much of the discussion of this at her latest blog posting where Steven Evans writes nobody wants … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Twistors and the Standard Model

Posted on August 11, 2020 by woit

For the past few months I’ve been working on writing up some ideas I’m quite excited about, and the pandemic has helped move things along by removing distractions and forcing me to mostly stay home. There’s now something written that … Continue reading →

Posted in Euclidean Twistor Unification | 15 Comments

Quantization and Dirac Cohomology

Posted on August 7, 2020 by woit

For many years I’ve been fascinated by the topic of “Dirac cohomology” and its possible relations to various questions about quantization and quantum field theory. At first I was mainly trying to understand the relation to BRST, and wrote some … Continue reading →

Posted in BRST | Comments Off on Quantization and Dirac Cohomology

(Imaginary) Time Asymmetry

Posted on August 6, 2020 by woit

When people write down a list of axioms for quantum mechanics, they typically neglect to include a crucial one: positivity (or more generally, boundedness below) of the energy. This is equivalent to saying that something very different happens when you … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Mechanics | 22 Comments

Yesterday’s Hype

Posted on August 1, 2020 by woit

Every summer CERN runs a summer student programme, designed to bring in a group of students to participate in scientific activities at CERN and provide lectures for them about the basics and latest state of the field of high energy … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 28 Comments

What is “Spin”?

Posted on July 23, 2020 by woit

The explanation for the lack of blogging here the past month is mostly that I haven’t seen any news worth blogging about. It took only a little bit of self-control to not do things like make snarky comments about recent … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 28 Comments

HEP News

Posted on June 18, 2020 by woit

The CERN Council is meeting today and tomorrow, and should approve the long-awaited 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. There will be a live webcast of the open part of the Council meeting on Friday. My understanding … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 37 Comments

HEP Theory Job Situation

Posted on June 17, 2020 by woit

Way back in the 1980s and 1990s I was, for obvious personal reasons, paying close attention to the job situation for young HEP theorists. They were not good at all: way more talented young theorists than jobs, many if not … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions

Posted on June 15, 2020 by woit

Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a few of the lectures available here. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments