Monthly Archives: August 2015

SUSY 2015

Posted on August 29, 2015 by woit

SUSY 2015, this year’s version of the big annual conference on supersymmetry, has been going on for the past week at Lake Tahoe. Joe Lykken began his summary talk by explaining how as a kid he was a big fan … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania, Uncategorized | 36 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on August 28, 2015 by woit

Bogus media stories about how “physicists finally find a way to test string theory” have now been with us for decades, with a large number of them documented here. Recently this phenomenon seemed to finally be dying down, with such … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 10 Comments

A Singularly Unfeminine Profession

Posted on August 23, 2015 by woit

Phenomenologist Mary K. Gaillard has recently published an autobiographical memoir, with the title A Singularly Unfeminine Profession, and last week’s Nature has a detailed review. Gaillard is a very distinguished HEP phenomenologist, with a career that began in the 1960s, … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 12 Comments

Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies and the Multiverse

Posted on August 22, 2015 by woit

This past week the large biennial “Lepton-Photon” (International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies) conference has been taking place in Ljubljana. These have been going on since 1965, now alternating years with the ICHEP (“Rochester”) conference. It’s been … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Multiverse Mania | 17 Comments

Genius at Play

Posted on August 15, 2015 by woit

A month or two ago I read the new biography of John Conway, Genius at Play, by Siobhan Roberts (whose book about Coxeter I reviewed here). Since then, writing about it has been on my to-do list, but I wasn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 30 Comments

Short Items

Posted on August 12, 2015 by woit

A few short items: The New Yorker has its own coverage here of the NSA GenCyber summer camp program for children that was discussed here. The LHC is about to start doing physics again at 13 TeV, with beam intensity … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 21 Comments

Multiverses: Science or Science Fiction?

Posted on August 3, 2015 by woit

The September issue of Astronomy magazine is now out, with a cover story on Multiverses: Science or Science Fiction? The author Bob Berman does a good job of explaining both the arguments for various Multiverses, as well as the reasons … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 59 Comments

Math and Physics Summer Camps

Posted on August 1, 2015 by woit

With the kids shipped off to NSA summer camp, now is the time for mathematicians and physicists to head off to their own summer camp experiences. Some of these have websites where the rest of us can participate a bit … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments