Author Archives: woit

This Week’s Hype

Posted on September 15, 2016 by woit

Quanta Magazine has over the past couple years been establishing a well-deserved reputation as the smartest and best science journalism around. At the opposite extreme, over many years of interacting with science journalists, the most embarrassingly incompetent one I’ve run … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 25 Comments

Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy

Posted on September 12, 2016 by woit

Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe is finally being published this week. This is a bit of a landmark event, since the book has a long history, going back to a series of … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 34 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on September 8, 2016 by woit

A few unrelated items: Maybe Multiverse Mania in the popular press is fading. The Atlantic has The Multiverse Idea is Rotting Culture, where the author points out In 2014, the New Scientist published an article called “Multiverse Me,” revealing that … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

Weapons of Math Destruction

Posted on September 6, 2016 by woit

Cathy O’Neil’s important new book Weapons of Math Destruction, is out today, and if you’re at all interested in the social significance of how mathematics is now being used, you should go out and get a copy. She has been … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 30 Comments

Templeton News

Posted on September 1, 2016 by woit

Looking at my list of items to blog about, I see most of them have some relation to the Templeton Foundation, so this will be a blog post just about those. To get some idea of the scale of Templeton’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Not Ever Wrong

Posted on August 22, 2016 by woit

The “SUSY Bet” event in Copenhagen took place today, with video available for a while at this site. It appears to be gone for the moment, will put up a better link if it becomes available. An expensive bottle of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 106 Comments

Various News

Posted on August 19, 2016 by woit

Before turning to other topics, congratulations to my Columbia colleague Wei Zhang, who was awarded the Gold Medal at the recent ICCM in Beijing. On the HEP physics front, some news is: On Monday at 1:30pm Danish time, at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

The Nightmare Scenario

Posted on August 10, 2016 by woit

Now back from a short vacation, and there seems to have been a lot happening on the debate over fundamental physics front. From the experimentalists, news that the Standard Model continues to resist falsification: At ICHEP, as expected, new data … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 42 Comments

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