Author Archives: woit

Planck Results

Posted on March 21, 2013 by woit

The long awaited CMB results from the Planck satellite are now out, see here. A NASA press conference is about to start here. You really should be reading about this somewhere else, from a much better informed blogger, someone expert … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Fundamental Physics Prize to Polyakov

Posted on March 20, 2013 by woit

As I predicted a few days ago, the string theorists in Princeton have made their choice for the $3 million dollar Fundamental Physics Prize: another Princeton string theorist, Alexander Polyakov. Evidently there’s no official announcement, so Matt Strassler has retracted … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Abel Prize to Pierre Deligne

Posted on March 20, 2013 by woit

Just woke up to see that this year’s Abel Prize has gone to algebraic geometer and number theorist Pierre Deligne, who is one of the truly great figures in 20th century mathematics. Deligne first became well-known for his proof of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Joe Lykken: No SUSY, No Naturalness Problem

Posted on March 19, 2013 by woit

Conventional wisdom in the particle theory for about 30 years has been that the Standard Model has a huge “hierarchy” or “naturalness” problem, the solution to which is supposed to appear at the LHC via SUSY or some other new … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 42 Comments

God to Award Prizes for God Particle

Posted on March 19, 2013 by woit

In more news about the Fundamental Physics Prize awards planned for tomorrow evening at CERN, it turns out that God himself (AKA Morgan Freeman) will be giving out the awards, as well as hosting a TV show about this the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Busy Week

Posted on March 16, 2013 by woit

There should be lots of breaking news this upcoming week, sometimes with real-time webcasts for those that want to follow along: Planck data release on Thursday the 21st. Media briefing in Paris will be at 10am local time, see here. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Request for Advice

Posted on March 15, 2013 by woit

My main method for keeping track of new information on the web has for many years now been RSS, with Google Reader for a while the main tool for this. Google yesterday announced that they’re shutting this down, with as … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 42 Comments

Disappearing gammas

Posted on March 14, 2013 by woit

The CMS data on the Higgs in the gamma-gamma channel has been released this morning, see slides from a talk at Moriond. Basically the excess over the SM prediction seen in this channel in earlier data is gone, with CMS … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 16 Comments

More about Nothing

Posted on March 13, 2013 by woit

It seems that last year’s philosopher-physicist fight over nothingness (if you missed this, you can read about it starting here) is flaring up again. Recall that it all started with a David Albert New York Times review of Lawrence Krauss’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 25 Comments

Things to Follow This Week

Posted on March 12, 2013 by woit

If you want to keep up on the latest in HEP news, here’s what you should be following this week: Neutrino Telescopes is happening in Venice this year, and I noticed that there’s a very active blog for the conference, … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 6 Comments