Author Archives: woit

A Cosmic Controversy

Posted on May 10, 2017 by woit

A couple months ago Scientific American published an article by Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb (also available here), which I discussed a bit here. One aspect of the article was its strong challenge to multiverse mania, calling it the “multimess” and … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Multiverse Mania | 53 Comments

Some Quick Items

Posted on May 10, 2017 by woit

A few quick items, I may use this posting to add a couple more later, the next posting will discuss today’s letter to Scientific American about inflation. Today’s LHCC meeting at CERN had reports from the LHC machine and experiments. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Theories of Everything

Posted on May 2, 2017 by woit

I’ve written a review for the latest issue of Physics World of a short new book by Frank Close, entitled Theories of Everything. You can read the review here. As I discuss in the review, Close explains a lot of … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 26 Comments

Why String Theory is Still Not Even Wrong

Posted on April 27, 2017 by woit

John Horgan recently sent me some questions, and has put them and my answers up at his Scientific American site, under the title Why String Theory is Still Not Even Wrong. My thanks to him for the questions and for … Continue reading →

Posted in Fake Physics, Multiverse Mania | 37 Comments

Two Pet Peeves

Posted on April 20, 2017 by woit

I was reminded of two of my pet peeves while taking a look at the appendix A of this paper. As a public service to physicists I thought I’d go on about them here, and provide some advice to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 28 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on April 16, 2017 by woit

A few quick items: I was very sorry to hear recently of the death of David Goss (obituary here), a mathematician specialist in function fields who was at Ohio State. David had a side interest in physics and was a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

The Social Bubble of Physics

Posted on April 7, 2017 by woit

Sabine Hossenfelder is on a tear this week, with two excellent and highly provocative pieces about research practice in theoretical physics, a topic on which she has become the field’s most perceptive critic. The first is in this month’s Nature … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 71 Comments

Some Math and Physics Interactions

Posted on April 5, 2017 by woit

Quanta magazine has a new article about physicists “attacking” the Riemann Hypothesis, based on the publication in PRL of this paper. The only comment from a mathematician evaluating relevance of this to a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis basically says … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

New LHC Results

Posted on March 22, 2017 by woit

This week results are being presented by the LHC experiments at the Moriond (twitter here) and Aspen conferences. While these so far have not been getting much publicity from CERN or in the media, they are quite significant, as first … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 60 Comments

This Time It’s For Real

Posted on March 10, 2017 by woit

Several months ago I was advertising a “Final draft version” of the book I’ve been working on forever. A month or two after that though, I realized that I could do a more careful job with some of the quantum … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Theory: The Book | 39 Comments