Author Archives: woit

Wormhole Publicity Stunts: Past, Present and Future

Posted on December 9, 2022 by woit

Most of the news I’m hearing today about the current wormhole publicity stunt is that physicists who could do something about it are instead blaming any problem on journalists and defending the stunt as some sort of progress forward. I’ve … Continue reading →

Posted in Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 13 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on December 8, 2022 by woit

If you’re sick of hearing about bogus wormholes, here are some other random topics: There’s a SCOAP3 for books initiative, lots of textbooks in the field of particle physics now made open access and available here. It’s completely mysterious to … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Publicity Stunt Fallout

Posted on December 6, 2022 by woit

Latest news this evening from Scott Aaronson at the IAS in Princeton: Tonight, David Nirenberg, Director of the IAS and a medieval historian, gave an after-dinner speech to our workshop, centered around how auspicious it was that the workshop was … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 29 Comments

The Wormhole Publicity Stunt

Posted on December 3, 2022 by woit

The best way to understand the “physicists create wormholes in the lab” nonsense of the past few days is as a publicity stunt (I should credit Andreas Karch for the idea to describe things this way), one that went too … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 59 Comments

Igor Krichever 1950-2022

Posted on December 1, 2022 by woit

I just heard the sad news that Igor Krichever passed away this morning at the age of 72. Igor was a great scholar, a wise man, and a wonderful human being. He will be sorely missed by his colleagues at … Continue reading →

Posted in Obituaries | 2 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on November 30, 2022 by woit

This morning Quanta Magazine informs us that Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer, promoting the article on Twitter with BREAKING: Physicists have built a wormhole and successfully sent information from one end to the other and Physicists have … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype, Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 37 Comments

Comments on AdS/CFT

Posted on November 30, 2022 by woit

This is something I wrote back in June, for context see the next posting. First of all, there’s the following, which is not strictly scientific, but very relevant to how one decides to evaluate progress in a subject. The Maldacena … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

The Mystery of Spin

Posted on November 22, 2022 by woit

Scientific American has a new article today about the supposedly mysterious fact that electrons have “spin” even though they aren’t classical spinning material objects. The article doesn’t link to it, but it appears that it is discussing this paper by … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Mechanics | 45 Comments

Math Job Rumors

Posted on November 17, 2022 by woit

I noticed yesterday a website named Math Job Rumors that has been operating for a couple months. No idea what the story behind it is other than that it’s clearly a descendant of Economics Job Market Rumors, which had some … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Career Prospects for HEP-TH Students

Posted on November 14, 2022 by woit

Guangyu Xu, a student just finishing his Ph.D. at the Centre for Particle Physics at Durham University, recently sent me a public letter he wrote, explaining the story of his job search, in hopes that it might be useful to … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments