Author Archives: woit

HEP Physics News

Posted on July 31, 2016 by woit

ICHEP 2016 starts in Chicago this week. Talks about the new diphoton results are scheduled for 9am (Chicago time) Friday. There will also be talks later in the day at CERN (5pm Geneva time), scheduled as part of this summer’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Strings 2XXX, Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Monumental Proof to Torment Mathematicians for Years to Come

Posted on July 28, 2016 by woit

Davide Castelvecchi at Nature has talked to some of the mathematicians at the recent Kyoto workshop on Mochizuki’s proposed proof of the abc conjecture, and written up a summary under the appropriate title Monumental proof to torment mathematicians for years … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture | 46 Comments

Quantum Theory and Representation Theory, the Book

Posted on July 26, 2016 by woit

For the last few years most of my time has been spent working on writing a textbook, with the current title Quantum Theory, Groups and Representations: An Introduction. The book is based on a year-long course that I’ve taught twice, … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Theory: The Book | 13 Comments

WIMPs on Death Row

Posted on July 21, 2016 by woit

One of the main arguments given for the idea of supersymmetric extensions of the standard model has been what SUSY enthusiasts call the “WIMP Miracle” (WIMP=Weakly Interacting Massive Particle). This is the claim that such SUSY models include a stable … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 52 Comments

Ghostbusters

Posted on July 14, 2016 by woit

Last night I went to a preview screening of the new Ghostbusters film. This isn’t a review, all I’ll say is that if you liked the first one, you’d probably like this one too. In the first film, an early … Continue reading →

Posted in Film Reviews | 14 Comments

Physics and Math News

Posted on July 11, 2016 by woit

Now back from vacation, here’s the latest on revolutionary developments in physics and mathematics: On the high energy physics front, the good news is that the LHC is performing remarkably well, with already over 13 inverse fb of luminosity, far … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 39 Comments

Short Items

Posted on June 30, 2016 by woit

Erica Klarreich at Quanta magazine has a wonderful profile of Peter Scholze. Scholze has been busy revolutionizing various parts of arithmetic geometry in recent years, and the article does a good job of giving some of the flavor of this. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Some Ancient History

Posted on June 27, 2016 by woit

A couple months ago there was a session at an APS meeting with the topic Sidney Coleman Remembered. Slides are available for talks by Coleman’s student Erick Weinberg and colleague Howard Georgi. Georgi has recently posted a written version of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

Rumor Mongering

Posted on June 21, 2016 by woit

Since I don’t see why Resonaances should have all the fun, I guess I’ll post something here about the big upcoming news of the summer: is the 750 GeV diphoton bump still there in the 2016 LHC data? We’re very … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 39 Comments

String Sociology

Posted on June 20, 2016 by woit

If you’re interested in the various sorts of internal divisions these days among people doing what gets called “string theory”, you might want to take a look at this blog entry and the discussion there with string phenomenologist Joseph Conlon. … Continue reading →

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 8 Comments