Author Archives: woit

This posting is about the problems with the idea that you can simply formulate quantum mechanical systems by picking a configuration space, an action functional S on paths in this space, and evaluating path integrals of the form $$\int_{\text{paths}}e^{iS[\text{path}]}$$ Necessity … Continue reading →

Two things recently made me think I should write something about path integrals: Quanta magazine has a new article out entitled How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities and Tony Zee has a new book out, … Continue reading →

Since I had a little free time today, I was thinking of writing something motivated by two things I saw today, Sabine Hossenfelder’s What’s Going Wrong in Particle Physics, and this summer’s upcoming SUSY 2023 conference and pre-SUSY 2023 school. … Continue reading →

In recent years I’ve found there’s no point to trying to have an intelligible argument about “string theory”, simply because the term no longer has any well-defined meaning. At the KITP next spring, there will be a program devoted to … Continue reading →

This semester I’m teaching the second half of our graduate course on Lie groups and representations, and have started making plans for the course, which will begin next week. There’s a web-page here which I’ll be adding to as time … Continue reading →

Earlier this year I bought a copy of the recently published version of Grothendieck’s Récoltes et Semailles, and spent quite a lot of time reading it. I wrote a bit about it here, intended to write something much longer when … Continue reading →