Author Archives: woit

The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory

Posted on June 12, 2017 by woit

Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current state of string theory, but to the possibility … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

2018 US HEP Budget

Posted on June 6, 2017 by woit

HEPAP has been meeting the past couple days, with presentations available here. Much of the discussion is about the President’s 2018 budget proposal recently submitted to Congress, which contains drastic cuts to all sorts of programs, including for support of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Multiverse Politics

Posted on June 1, 2017 by woit

The political campaign for the multiverse continues today with a piece by Amanda Gefter at Nautilus. It’s a full-throated salvo from the Linde-Guth side of the multiverse propaganda war they are now waging, with Linde dismissing Steinhardt’s criticism as based … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 37 Comments

A Few Quick Items

Posted on May 31, 2017 by woit

I’ve had little time for blogging, and coincidentally, there seems to be little to blog about recently. Here though are a few quick items: Several people had asked me about this paper about the CC, and I had to tell … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

GAMBIT

Posted on May 23, 2017 by woit

The LHCP 2017 conference was held this past week in Shanghai, and among the results announced there were new negative results about SUSY from ATLAS with both ATLAS and CMS now reporting for instance limits on gluino masses of around … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

This Month’s Hype

Posted on May 16, 2017 by woit

It seems that a couple of the authors of the recent Cosmic Controversy letter (discussed here) are going on a campaign to embarrass the 29 physicists who were convinced to sign their letter. Andrei Linde has gone to Lubos Motl’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 49 Comments

A Cosmic Controversy

Posted on May 10, 2017 by woit

A couple months ago Scientific American published an article by Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb (also available here), which I discussed a bit here. One aspect of the article was its strong challenge to multiverse mania, calling it the “multimess” and … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Multiverse Mania | 53 Comments

Some Quick Items

Posted on May 10, 2017 by woit

A few quick items, I may use this posting to add a couple more later, the next posting will discuss today’s letter to Scientific American about inflation. Today’s LHCC meeting at CERN had reports from the LHC machine and experiments. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Theories of Everything

Posted on May 2, 2017 by woit

I’ve written a review for the latest issue of Physics World of a short new book by Frank Close, entitled Theories of Everything. You can read the review here. As I discuss in the review, Close explains a lot of … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 26 Comments

Why String Theory is Still Not Even Wrong

Posted on April 27, 2017 by woit

John Horgan recently sent me some questions, and has put them and my answers up at his Scientific American site, under the title Why String Theory is Still Not Even Wrong. My thanks to him for the questions and for … Continue reading →

Posted in Fake Physics, Multiverse Mania | 37 Comments