Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Inference

Posted on February 2, 2019 by woit

The first issue of the magazine Inference appeared online back in 2014. At the time, it was surrounded by a significant amount of mystery: who were the editors, what were they trying to do, and who was funding it? I … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 50 Comments

This Week’s Hype (and a couple other things)

Posted on December 28, 2018 by woit

For today’s university press release designed to mislead the public with hype about string theory, Uppsala University has Our Universe: An expanding bubble in an extra dimension. It’s the Swampland variant of string theory hype, based on this preprint, which … Continue reading →

Posted in Swampland, This Week's Hype, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Chronic Incompleteness of String Theory

Posted on December 19, 2018 by woit

Ex-string theorist turned philosopher Richard Dawid has become known over the years for his arguments that string theory is a theory to be evaluated not by the conventional scientific method, in which experiment plays a role, but by “post-empirical theory … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Notes on Current Affairs

Posted on December 8, 2018 by woit

Blogging has been light recently, partly due to quite a bit of traveling. This included a brief trip the week before last to Los Angeles, where I met up with, among others, Sabine Hossenfelder. This past week I was in … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Langlands/Frenkel and Some Other Things

Posted on November 16, 2018 by woit

The Canadian publication The Walrus today has a wonderful article about Robert Langlands, focusing on his attitude towards the geometric Langlands program and its talented proponent Edward Frenkel. I watched Frenkel’s talk at the ongoing Minnesota conference via streaming video … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands, Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Updates

Posted on November 1, 2018 by woit

Based on this preprint from Banks and Fischler, I added an update to the FAQ entry about why the ever-popular “string theory makes predictions, but only at high energies where they can’t be tested” argument is not true. This preprint … Continue reading →

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Breaking News

Posted on October 17, 2018 by woit

Two midday breaking news items: The ACME II experiment is reporting today a new, nearly order of magnitude better, limit on the electric dipole moment of the electron: $$|d_e|\leq 1.1 \times 10^{-29} e\ cm$$ The previous best bound was from … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on September 28, 2018 by woit

First, news related in some way to Australia: This summer the Sydney Morning Herald published a nice profile of Geordie Williamson. By the way, the ICM plenary lectures are finally available on video, with Williamson’s among those worth watching. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews, Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on August 31, 2018 by woit

A collection of links that may be of interest: Talks from the SM at 50 conference held earlier this summer are available here. A detailed expose of the “Fake Science Factory” is here, a related Nature story is here. For … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Quantum Supremacy

Posted on August 26, 2018 by woit

Hasn’t been much that I’ve heard about worth discussing here recently. Presumably everyone is on vacation. I’ll try and gather some things that may be of interest, starting first with the hot topic of “quantum computation”. It looks like this … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments