Search Results for: Kaku

Mission Accomplished

Posted on February 18, 2009 by woit

A few years ago the asset value of string theory in the market-place of ideas started to take a tumble due to the increasingly obvious failure of the idea of unifying physics with a 10/11 dimensional string/M-theory. Since then a … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 82 Comments

Shouldn’t Something Be Done?

Posted on November 19, 2008 by woit

The sheer awfulness of last night’s History Channel program on physics is hard to exaggerate. Here’s some of what Clifford Johnson (one of the participants in the program) wrote on his blog while watching it: Oh, right… I remember “there … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 39 Comments

Science and Science Fiction

Posted on November 18, 2008 by woit

I just set my DVR to record this evening’s broadcast on the History Channel of Parallel Universes, and noticed that the summary information about the show reads: Some of the world’s leading physicists believe they have found evidence proving the … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 5 Comments

2008 Physics Nobel Prize

Posted on October 7, 2008 by woit

Half of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Yoichiro Nambu for his work on spontaneous symmetry breaking, the other half to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the CKM matrix as an explanation of CP breaking. A detailed … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

Don’t Buy Into the Supercollider Hype

Posted on September 13, 2008 by woit

Some wag at the Wall Street Journal put the headline Don’t Buy Into the Supercollider Hype on today’s Op-Ed piece by Michio Kaku about the LHC, which describes its significance as follows: The LHC might shed light on the “theory … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 39 Comments

This and That

Posted on April 27, 2008 by woit

The interactions.org web-site has a new useful feature, Interactions Blog Watch, which aggregates links to recent physics-related blog entries. One of the older such aggregators I know of is Mixed States, but it seems to have stopped on March 15. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 59 Comments

Short Items

Posted on April 4, 2008 by woit

The Tevatron has been performing well, producing record-high weekly luminosities. Fermilab director Oddone has announced that plans to shut-down the accelerator complex for yearly maintenance work are being canceled this year, instead the plan is to run the Tevatron straight … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Esquire On The State of Particle Theory

Posted on November 15, 2006 by woit

You know things are getting strange when Esquire magazine starts running an article on the current state of particle theory. As you might expect, their take on this is rather odd. It centers around Nima Arkani-Hamed and begins with: For … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 47 Comments

The String Wars

Posted on October 18, 2006 by woit

I noticed recently that George Johnson will be journalist in residence and giving a talk on Friday at the KITP in Santa Barbara about “The String Wars”. Somehow I don’t really think that it’s a good thing that this is … Continue reading →

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 97 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on July 13, 2006 by woit

This week’s string theory hype is embedded in a story by Michael Schirber about the possibility of variation of fundamental constants that has appeared on msnbc.com, foxnews.com, and Slashdot. According to Schirber: A popular alternative to relativity, which assumes that … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 62 Comments