Author Archives: woit

This Week’s Hype (and a couple other things)

Posted on December 28, 2018 by woit

For today’s university press release designed to mislead the public with hype about string theory, Uppsala University has Our Universe: An expanding bubble in an extra dimension. It’s the Swampland variant of string theory hype, based on this preprint, which … Continue reading →

Posted in Swampland, This Week's Hype, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Tim May 1951-2018

Posted on December 24, 2018 by woit

I was sorry to learn yesterday of the death of Tim May, who had been a frequent commenter here on the blog. For more about his life, see here and here. One can find his comments here for instance by … Continue reading →

Posted in Obituaries | 2 Comments

The Chronic Incompleteness of String Theory

Posted on December 19, 2018 by woit

Ex-string theorist turned philosopher Richard Dawid has become known over the years for his arguments that string theory is a theory to be evaluated not by the conventional scientific method, in which experiment plays a role, but by “post-empirical theory … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on December 19, 2018 by woit

A few months ago string theorists at Stanford had their university press office put out hype-filled promotional material about their research field, this was discussed here. One odd thing about this was that normally such PR efforts are made in … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 3 Comments

Notes on Current Affairs

Posted on December 8, 2018 by woit

Blogging has been light recently, partly due to quite a bit of traveling. This included a brief trip the week before last to Los Angeles, where I met up with, among others, Sabine Hossenfelder. This past week I was in … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

The End of (one type of) Physics, and the Rise of the Machines

Posted on November 20, 2018 by woit

Way back in 1996 science writer John Horgan published The End of Science, in which he made the argument that various fields of science were running up against obstacles to any further progress of the magnitude they had previously experienced. … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 43 Comments

Langlands/Frenkel and Some Other Things

Posted on November 16, 2018 by woit

The Canadian publication The Walrus today has a wonderful article about Robert Langlands, focusing on his attitude towards the geometric Langlands program and its talented proponent Edward Frenkel. I watched Frenkel’s talk at the ongoing Minnesota conference via streaming video … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands, Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Updates

Posted on November 1, 2018 by woit

Based on this preprint from Banks and Fischler, I added an update to the FAQ entry about why the ever-popular “string theory makes predictions, but only at high energies where they can’t be tested” argument is not true. This preprint … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Updates

Langlands News

Posted on October 30, 2018 by woit

Various Langlands program related news, starting with the man himself: For the latest from Langlands about the geometric theory, best if you read both Russian and Turkish. In that case you can read this and this. For the rest of … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 11 Comments

The End of LHC Run 2 and the Road Ahead

Posted on October 24, 2018 by woit

Some experimental HEP news items: Since 2015 the LHC experiments have been taking data from proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV. This is “Run 2” of the LHC, “Run 1” was at the lower energy of 8 TeV. The proton-proton Run … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 34 Comments