Author Archives: woit

Gravitational Wave Predictions

I think I can confidently predict that tomorrow morning either one of two things will happen: The first observation of gravitational waves will be reported by the LIGO experiment. A large fraction of the scientific community will be really, really … Continue reading

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Stacks Project Party

Last night I got to attend a major event of the Manhattan social season, a party celebrating the fact that the Stacks Project has reached the milestone of 5000 pages. As far as anyone knows, no one has ever printed … Continue reading

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Rutgers Talk

Slides from my talk at Rutgers are now available here. The idea was just to advertise to physicists there the point of view that is all too familiar to regular readers here. The final speculative comments about relations to mathematics … Continue reading

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Some News

Not much time for blogging at the moment, with one reason that I’ll be giving a talk at Rutgers on Wednesday, and need to get that prepared. A few quick items: As some commenters have mentioned here, talks from the … Continue reading

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More From Polchinski

Joe Polchinski has a rather odd preprint on hep-th, more of a blog posting than a paper, summing up his views on string theory and the multiverse. This is a revised version, wisely dropping a really unfortunate section. The material … Continue reading

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Hitler doesn’t get a postdoc in High Energy Theory

I recognize that this is a genre that is a bit tired, and arguably in poor taste, but the commentary on the HEP theory postdoc job market in the video Hitler doesn’t get a postdoc in High Energy Theory is … Continue reading

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Back at Work

It’s been a while since the last posting here, mostly because I’ve been away on vacation, but also because I haven’t seen anything that newsworthy. But, since I’m back in the office and there have been complaints, here are a … Continue reading

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Various and Sundry

Some short items on a wide variety of topics: The Hawking/Perry/Strominger paper on a new idea about the black hole information paradox (see here for an early discussion) based on BMS supertranslation symmetries has now appeared on the arXiv. I’m … Continue reading

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End of Year Links

A collection of links to round out the year: The Seminaire Bourbaki talks this January look unusually interesting. Luckily I’ll be in Paris at that time. For an end of year present, Jacob Lurie has posted a version of his … Continue reading

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Why String Theory?

I recently got a copy of Joseph Conlon’s new book Why String Theory? and was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s quite good. Conlon is a lively, entertaining writer, generally sensible about the scientific issues involved, and I think does … Continue reading

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