Monthly Archives: May 2011

Cycles of Time

Posted on May 27, 2011 by woit

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a review I wrote of Sir Roger Penrose’s new book Cycles of Time. The review is aimed at a much wider audience than this blog, and is the product of substantial editing to get its … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 44 Comments

Cosmological Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Posted on May 19, 2011 by woit

It seems that there’s now a new burgeoning field bringing together multiverse studies and interpretational issues in quantum mechanics. Last year Aguirre, Tegmark and Layzer came out with with Born in an Infinite Universe: a Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 64 Comments

Particle Theory Job Market 2011

Posted on May 19, 2011 by woit

By now the hiring season for tenure-track jobs is pretty much over, and for the field of particle theory some idea of the results is available at the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill. As has been usual for the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

Hawking and the Google Zeitgeist

Posted on May 16, 2011 by woit

Today is the first day of this year’s Google Zeitgeist gathering of high-powered world leaders and thinkers (described here, it seems that Google either doesn’t believe in having a web presence, or it’s a secret one. Anyway, my attempts to … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 49 Comments

The Big Bang

Posted on May 15, 2011 by woit

There’s a new film out this weekend with a particle physics theme (no string theory), called The Big Bang, starring Antonio Banderas. I figured that it’s my duty to cover this kind of popular culture use of particle physics, so … Continue reading →

Posted in Film Reviews | 13 Comments

Recent NSF Grants

Posted on May 11, 2011 by woit

In responding to a comment on the previous posting, I was curious if one could easily get some data on relative sizes of grants in mathematics and physics, so started to do a quick search on nsf.gov. Among the first … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 29 Comments

Pricey Strings

Posted on May 11, 2011 by woit

In recent years most of the conferences I’ve attended have been mathematics and mathematical physics ones, and I had noticed that, while modest registration fees were often a feature many years ago, these days most such conferences, especially in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on May 8, 2011 by woit

Philip Gibbs points to an impressive piece of string theory hype from British Channel 4 news. If you watch the clip, you get the latest news about string theory and the LHC: people were getting discouraged about string theory, but … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 21 Comments

Not a Leak

Posted on May 8, 2011 by woit

ATLAS this weekend has finally released their latest analysis of the gamma-gamma invariant mass spectrum, carried out in response to claims from within their collaboration that a 4 sigma Higgs signal had been observed in this channel. The result? Nada: … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 2 Comments

This Week’s Leak

Posted on May 4, 2011 by woit

Recently there was a bit of a kerfuffle triggered by someone leaking here the abstract of an internal ATLAS document claiming to have found a Higgs signal as a bump in the gamma-gamma invariant mass distribution. After some initial discussion … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 19 Comments