Blog Profile / Not Even Wrong
| URL : | http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Physics | |
| Posts on Regator: | 531 | |
| Posts / Week: | 2.3 | |
| Archived Since: | December 12, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Quick Links
This should be a month with quite a bit of experimental news, including Latest Higgs news from the LHC experiments here on Wednesday. Release of data from AMS-02 was advertised as “two to three weeks away” back on February 17. … Continue reading ?
The State of SUSY
Results putting new limits on SUSY based on the entire first run of the LHC are starting to emerge (see for example this from CMS) with more likely at Moriond next week. Since one is dealing with a theory with … Continue reading ?
Higgs News
Official announcements won’t come out until the Moriond conference first week of March, but reliable rumors are starting to trickle out about what the Higgs news will be. ATLAS will report (based on about 21 fb-1 of 8 TeV data … Continue reading ?
SUSY and Quantum Mechanics
You may have read somewhere today that Columbia professor strips down to underwear in bizarre lesson to help baffled students learn quantum mechanics (first-hand sources here and here). That wasn’t me, but I have been talking to my class for … Continue reading ?
Quick Links
Posting has been light recently, partly since I’ve been working on writing up notes for my course (more about that soon), but largely because there hasn’t been a lot of news to write about in the math-physics world. The LHC … Continue reading ?
Existence of Kähler-Einstein Metrics
An important recent development in geometry has been the announcement of two claimed proofs of a long-standing conjecture about the existence of Kähler-Einstein metrics. Simon Donaldson is talking about this at MIT this week (see here and here), and the … Continue reading ?
Short Items
Resonaances has an excellent posting about the latest WMAP9 CMB measurements, and the value Neff for the number of implied light degrees of freedom. When the WMAP numbers were released late last year, they quoted Neff=3.89+/-.67, 3.26+/-.35, 2.83+/-.38 for the … Continue reading ?
Arthur Wightman 1922-2013
I just heard today that mathematical physicist Arthur Wightman passed away earlier this month, at the age of 90. Wightman was one of the leading figures in the field of rigorous quantum field theory, the effort to try and make … Continue reading ?
This Week’s Finds
Twenty years ago this past week, John Baez posted the first of his "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics" to the sci.physics newsgroups, inaugurating internet blogging about Mathematical Physics, many years before anyone even knew what a blog was. For … Continue reading ?
Short Book Reviews
There’s now a fairly long list of books that I’ve found worthwhile recently and wanted to write about here, making it unlikely I’ll have time to write in detail about them. Instead, here are some short reviews: More than seven … Continue reading ?
The Anatomy of a Scientific Gossip
The University of Birmingham has put out a press release today about new research by their computer scientists, on the topic of the spread of gossip about the Higgs via Twitter. This is all based on an arXiv paper, The … Continue reading ?
CERN Briefing Book
This year the US and European HEP communities are engaging in exercises designed to put together plans for the future. In the US it’s Snowmass 2013, leading up to a big meeting in Minneapolis this summer. This past week has … Continue reading ?
What Should We Be Worried About?
Back from vacation today, so regular blogging likely to resume. Will start with something quick, a link to material that was posted today. The Edge web-site annual question feature is out today, with this year’s question What Should We Be … Continue reading ?
East Coast versus West Coast
Back when I was a student I remember learning that there were two possible sign conventions to use for the Minkowski space metric: the “East coast” one, mostly + signs, favored by relativists and Steven Weinberg, and the “West coast” … Continue reading ?
Various Links
This week there’s a conference in Oxford I’d have loved to have been at. Slides from some of the talks are already posted here. The conference is in honor of Graeme Segal’s 70th birthday. Happy Birthday Graeme! Physics Today has … Continue reading ?
Quantum Mechanics Fall Class Lecture Notes
Classes are over for the semester, and I’ve put together the lecture notes for my undergraduate “Quantum Mechanics for Mathematicians” course, which are available here. The idea for the course was to try and explain the basics of quantum mechanics, … Continue reading ?
Arkani-Hamed on Naturalness
For the latest SUSY enthusiast take on the implications of what the LHC has been (not) seeing, your best bet might be yesterday’s talk at the KITP by Nima Arkani-Hamed on Naturalness. An hour and 40 minutes, no slides, nothing … Continue reading ?
New Higgs Results Tomorrow?
As part of the CERN Council activities this week, there will be a session held with a live webcast tomorrow on Status of the LHC and Experiments. I’m hearing that there will be news about the Higgs from ATLAS: new … Continue reading...
New Milner Prizes
The New York Times is reporting that tomorrow Yuri Milner will be announcing the award of a new set of prizes for fundamental physics work, this time including some experimentalists as recipients. The awards are $3 million for the experimental … Continue reading ?
First Results from the Large Hardon Collider
There’s a conference in Bad Honnef going on now on entitled First Results from the LHC, with a website that carries two different interpretations of what “LHC” stands for (see the screenshot below): The talks are here, yesterday CERN DG … Continue reading ?