Author Archives: woit

The Terrifying Power of Mathematics

Posted on August 29, 2024 by woit

Ted Jacobson has put on the arXiv a transcription of a 1947 Feynman letter about his efforts to better understand the Dirac equation, in order to find a path integral formulation of it. The letter also contains some fascinating comments … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

The Elegant Universe: 25th Anniversary Edition

Posted on August 20, 2024 by woit

Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe is being reissued today, in a 25th anniversary edition. It’s the same text as the original, with the addition of a 5 page preface and a 36 page epilogue. The initial excitement among some theorists … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 17 Comments

Two More

Posted on August 13, 2024 by woit

Two more items: I can’t recommend strongly enough that you watch the new Curt Jaimungal podcast with Edward Frenkel. The nominal topic is the recent proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture, but this is introductory material, with geometric Langlands and … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands, Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on August 9, 2024 by woit

Starting to write a longer, more technical posting, but for now, a few quick links: The film Particle Fever (for more about this, see here) may get made into a musical. With a little luck they’ll skip the nonsense about … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Susskind: String Theory is Not the Theory of the Real World

Posted on August 7, 2024 by woit

Lawrence Krauss has just put up a long interview with Lenny Susskind. I was listening to it while doing something else, found myself shocked when the discussion got to the current state of string theory to find that I mostly … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Zombie Wormhole Publicity Stunt

Posted on August 2, 2024 by woit

I had thought that the Wormhole Publicity Stunt could now be safely ignored, with almost everyone in the physics community agreeing that this was an embarrassing disaster that was dead and buried. Even the people at Quanta had realized that … Continue reading →

Posted in Fake Physics, Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 14 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on July 31, 2024 by woit

A few items of different kinds: The Harvard Math department website has a wonderful profile of Dick Gross. The second International Congress of Basic Science ended a few days ago in Beijing. A huge number of interesting talks, video and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

The Harvard Swampland Initiative

Posted on July 12, 2024 by woit

The past few years I’ve been noticing more and more claims like this one, supposedly finding a way to “connect string theory to experiment”. When you look into such claims you don’t find anything at all like a conventional experiment/theory … Continue reading →

Posted in Swampland | 14 Comments

A Few Items

Posted on July 2, 2024 by woit

A few items, all involving Peter Scholze in one way or another: A seminar in Bonn on Scholze’s geometrization of real local Langlands is finishing up next week. This is working out details of ideas that Scholze presented at the … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture, Langlands | 14 Comments

Physical Intuition vs. “Math”

Posted on June 29, 2024 by woit

A common theme in discussions online of the problems of fundamental theoretical physics is that the subject has gotten “lost in math”, losing touch with “physical intuition”. In such discussions, when people refer to “math” it’s hard to figure out … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments