Monthly Archives: May 2009

Star Trek Warp Speed?

Posted on May 8, 2009 by woit

To continue with the string theory/movie theme, a commenter just wrote in to tell about some new ideas for using M-theory to create a warp-drive. These are contained in some papers from the past year or two by string theorists … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 19 Comments

Whatever Works

Posted on May 7, 2009 by woit

The latest Woody Allen film, Whatever Works, was shown recently at the Tribeca Film Festival. I missed it there, but it looks like I’ll have to see it when it comes out in theaters later this year. It features the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Witten Away From the Energy Frontier

Posted on May 7, 2009 by woit

Edward Witten has been visiting CERN this past academic year, and it seems that besides continuing to work on things related to geometric Langlands (see his recent talk at Atiyah80), he also has been returning to his roots as a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

LHC On Schedule

Posted on May 7, 2009 by woit

A couple weeks ago I linked here to a draft LHC schedule that had about 3 weeks slippage from the previous schedule, which has beam commissioning starting again on September 21 (week 39). This was due to delays in getting … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 4 Comments

Brane Science

Posted on May 2, 2009 by woit

There’s a nice article in Nature News about the solution to the Kervaire invariant problem mentioned here. It’s an excellent and accurate description of the result and its significance, except for the last paragraph, on “Brane science”, where the author … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 9 Comments

The Only Game in Town

Posted on May 1, 2009 by woit

This week’s New Scientist has an article promoting the string theory multiverse, starting off with positive comments from Brian Greene, and continuing with a claim that the majority of physicists now embrace the idea: Greene’s transformation is emblematic of a … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, This Week's Hype | 42 Comments