Author Archives: woit

Yet More About Grothendieck

Posted on February 16, 2016 by woit

Since Grothendieck’s death somewhat more than a year ago, quite a lot of new material about him and his mathematics has become available. Visit the Grothendieck Circle to find a lot of this, with just one example some new chapters … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on February 13, 2016 by woit

This week’s dramatic announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves was a major milestone for the fields of physics and astrophysics. The LIGO observation validates a lot of previously untested aspects of our understanding of general relativity, and promises the … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 30 Comments

Gravitational Wave Predictions

Posted on February 10, 2016 by woit

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

Posted on February 7, 2016 by woit

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

Posted on February 4, 2016 by woit

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | 44 Comments

Some News

Posted on January 31, 2016 by woit

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | 31 Comments

More From Polchinski

Posted on January 28, 2016 by woit

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

Posted on January 23, 2016 by woit

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

Back at Work

Posted on January 21, 2016 by woit

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on January 6, 2016 by woit

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments