Author Archives: woit

This Week’s Hype

Posted on May 25, 2014 by woit

About every three years KEK issues a hype-filled press release announcing that Jun Nishimura and collaborators have used a supercomputer to get evidence for string theory. Back in 2008, the announcement was of a numerical simulation on a supercomputer of … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 18 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on May 25, 2014 by woit

Just returned from a few days in Boston, will try and catch up here on various topics: This past week I was able to attend some of the talks at the conference in honor of David Vogan’s 60th birthday. I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands, Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics

Posted on May 14, 2014 by woit

Caltech has just announced the establishment of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, with Hirosi Ooguri as director. It will have a permanent endowment of around \$74 million, with \$30 million of that new funds from the Sherman Fairchild … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

BICEP2 News

Posted on May 13, 2014 by woit

Recall that this past March results from BICEP2 were announced, claiming a greater than 5 sigma detection of a primordial B-mode signal in the CMB polarization. This result received a huge amount of world-wide attention (and see some commentary here). … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Quillen Notebooks

Posted on May 6, 2014 by woit

Daniel Quillen, one of the greatest mathematicians of the latter part of the twentieth century, passed away in 2011 after suffering from Alzheimer’s. For an appreciation of his work and an explanation of its significance, a good place to start … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on April 28, 2014 by woit

The Defense Department has awarded a $7.5 million grant to Steve Awodey of CMU, Vladimir Voevodsky of the IAS and others to support research in Homotopy Type Theory and the foundations of mathematics. I had thought that getting DARPA 10 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Raising the Bar

Posted on April 23, 2014 by woit

If you’re looking for something to do next Tuesday evening here in New York, an event called Raising the Bar has recruited 50 people to give talks at bars around the city. There are some quite interesting talks on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics

Posted on April 15, 2014 by woit

The May issue of Scientific American has a very good cover story by Joe Lykken and Maria Spiropulu, entitled Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics (the article is now behind their subscriber paywall, but for those with access to Nature, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 51 Comments

Ten Years of Not Even Wrong

Posted on April 11, 2014 by woit

This blog was started a little bit over ten years ago, and I’ve been intending for a while to write something marking the occasion and commenting on what has changed over the past ten years. I’ve found this mostly a … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 62 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on April 5, 2014 by woit

Just time at the moment for some quick links. I’ll start with some math news, since there hasn’t been much of that here recently: Matt Baker has the sad news here of the death of Berkeley mathematician Robert Coleman recently, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments