Author Archives: woit

Updates

Posted on December 16, 2015 by woit

Some new items mostly updating older ones: Natalie Wolchover has a very good article at Quanta, entitled A Fight for the Soul of Science, reporting on the recent Munich conference discussed here. David Gross sounds a little bit like John … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 70 Comments

Run 2 and SUSY

Posted on December 15, 2015 by woit

What surprised me most about today’s Run 2 results (see here) was that CMS and ATLAS were able to already significantly push up limits on superpartner masses, especially the gluino mass. Limits on the gluino mass went from 1.3-1.4 TeV … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Uncategorized | 16 Comments

LHC Run 2 First Results

Posted on December 14, 2015 by woit

First results using the full data from Run 2 at 13 TeV will be presented tomorrow at CERN at 15:00 Geneva time, with a live webcast available here. For some relevant commentary, see Tommaso Dorigo and Matt Strassler. Among relatively … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 13 Comments

White Smoke Over Oxford?

Posted on December 10, 2015 by woit

I’ve stolen the title of this posting from Michael Harris, see his posting for a discussion of the same topic. A big topic of discussion among mathematicians this week is the ongoing workshop at Oxford devoted to Mochizuki’s claimed proof … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture | 37 Comments

Today’s Hype

Posted on December 9, 2015 by woit

Joe Polchinski’s contribution to the ongoing Munich meeting has now appeared on the arXiv, with the title String Theory to the Rescue. Evidently he’s not actually to be at the meeting, I’m not sure how his paper will be presented. … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 39 Comments

Next Week’s Hype

Posted on December 2, 2015 by woit

Next week there will be a workshop in Munich with the title Why Trust a Theory? Reconsidering Scientific Methodology in Light of Modern Physics. It’s organized by Richard Dawid, to discuss his ideas about “non-empirical theory confirmation”, developed to defend … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, This Week's Hype, Uncategorized | 54 Comments

Super and Great Colliders

Posted on November 30, 2015 by woit

I’ve recently finished reading two new books on huge collider projects, which make an interesting contrast. The first is From the Great Wall to the Great Collider, by Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau. It’s a very well-informed and topical book, … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews, Experimental HEP News | 13 Comments

Quick Items

Posted on November 25, 2015 by woit

A few quick items before the holiday: I hear that Luis Alvarez-Gaumé will be the next Director of the Simons Center, starting next Fall, taking over from John Morgan, the founding Director. My understanding is that the hope was to … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 45 Comments

This Week’s Non-Hype

Posted on November 23, 2015 by woit

Since I often post here complaints about articles produced by the press offices of various institutions that hype in a misleading way physicist’s theoretical work, I thought it a good idea to make up for this by noting a positive … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 37 Comments

Langlands Items

Posted on November 20, 2015 by woit

There’s an interesting development in the math-physics overlap, with a significant number of physicists getting interested in the theory of automorphic forms, often motivated by the problem of computing string scattering amplitudes. This has led to a group of them … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 8 Comments