Author Archives: woit

Stephen Hawking 1942-2018

Front-page on every news source today is the sad report that Stephen Hawking died yesterday at the age of 76. For the best description of his scientific accomplishments, I recommend the obituary in the Guardian written by his sometime collaborator … Continue reading

Posted in Obituaries | 13 Comments

Recent Developments in Constructive Field Theory

This week there’s a mini-workshop here at Columbia organized by the probabilists, on Recent Developments in Constructive Field Theory. I’ll be attending some of the talks, will write more here if I can come up with something constructive to say. … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Presumptuous Blogging

John Horgan at Scientific American today has an interview with Martin Rees in which Rees says: It’s presumptuous (as some people like Woit and Smolin have done) to deride the way some manifestly brilliant people choose to dedicate their scientific … Continue reading

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 28 Comments

Rochester Colloquium Talk

I’m heading up to Rochester this evening, will give a colloquium talk there in the physics department on Wednesday at 3:45. I’ll put up a link to the slides after the talk, for now, here’s the abstract: Particle theory: a … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Applied Group Theory

I just noticed that Greg Moore has been teaching a wonderful course in recent years with the misleadingly bland title of Applied Group Theory. His choice of the topics he wants to cover given here is an excellent one and … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Various and Sundry

I recently spent some time looking at old postings on this blog, partly because of writing this blog entry, partly because Gil Kalai got me a copy of his book Gina Says. For a moment I thought this would be … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Muon g-2 Anomaly Gone?

I just learned some interesting news from Tommaso Dorigo’s blog. Go there for more details, but the news is the claim in these three papers that, accounting for GR effects on the precision measurement of the muon anomalous magnetic moment, … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 54 Comments

15 Years of Multiverse Mania

Today is the 15th anniversary of the event that kicked off the Multiverse Mania that continues to this day, recently taking the form of a concerted attack on conventional notions of science. 2018 has seen an acceleration of this attack, … Continue reading

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 29 Comments

Quick Links

Various things that may be of interest, ordered from abstract math to concrete physics: Jacob Lurie is teaching a course this semester on Categorical Logic. Way back when I was a student at Harvard this is the kind of thing … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Beyond Falsifiability

Sean Carroll has a new paper out defending the Multiverse and attacking the naive Popperazi, entitled Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse. He also has a Beyond Falsifiability blog post here. Much of the problem with the paper and … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Multiverse Mania | 40 Comments