
| URL : | http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ | |
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| Filed Under: | Academics / Physics | |
| Posts on Regator: | 519 | |
| Posts / Week: | 2.2 | |
| Archived Since: | December 12, 2008 | |
Besides the Daily Mail, the AP is now reporting Proof of “God Particle” Found. They include the caveat: But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren’t quite … Continue reading ?
The Higgs discovery announcement will be at 9am next Wednesday. This is close enough that I can’t reasonably be accused of “subverting the scientific process” and ruining the LHC Higgs analyses by reporting the results here. Unfortunately, no source has … Continue reading ?
I learned via Physics World that CERN will hold a press conference on Wednesday July 4 to give an “Update on the search for the Higgs Boson”. More information has just appeared (including a press release here), showing that there … Continue reading ?
Just got out of 8 days in the Grand Canyon which was spectacular, Reliable rumors couldn’t wait, and they indicate that the experiments are seeing much the same thing as last year in this year’s new data: strong hints of … Continue reading ?
I should be packing for my trip, but couldn’t resist one last blog posting, since I’ve recently a run across a lot of interesting Langlands-related material, including: A Symposium this fall at the Fields Institute, in honor of Ngo’s Fields … Continue reading ?
It’s exactly a month until new LHC Higgs results are to be unveiled at ICHEP. The machine has been running well, and right about now should be the cut-off time after which new data will arrive too late for analysis … Continue readin...
It occurred to me today that right about now is the time someone should have chosen as the date for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the birth of the idea of “Topological Quantum Field Theory”, as well as … Continue reading ...
The German mathematician Friedrich (Fritz) Hirzebruch passed away a couple days ago, at the age of 84. Hirzebruch was perhaps the most important mathematician in the Germany during the postwar period, responsible for the founding of the Max Planck Institute … Continue reading ?
Multiverse Mania makes the big time this week, with a cover story Welcome to the Multiverse by Brian Greene in Newsweek. While the title indicates that the Multiverse is here and part of our scientific world-view, the subtitle is a … Continue reading ?
The announcement of new Higgs results from the LHC is now scheduled for about a month and a half from now, July 7th, 9:30 and 10am Melbourne time, at ICHEP2012. The LHC is performing well, with nearly 2.5 fb-1 of … Continue reading ...
There’s at least one thing about string theory that has changed dramatically since my book was written back in 2002 or so. At the time I accumulated various numbers showing the way hiring in particle theory at leading institutions in … Continue reading ?
The implications of the failure to find SUSY at the LHC are beginning to sink into the particle physics community: the paradigm that dominated the subject for the past 30 years has collapsed in the face of experimental (non)-evidence, threatening … Continue reading ?
This week Yale is hosting a conference on Perspectives in Representation Theory, in honor of Igor Frenkel’s 60th birthday. I’m planning to take the train up there and attend some of the talks tomorrow and Wednesday. Frenkel has been a … Continue reading ?
With a lot of attention these days (see here for instance) going to an argument between philosophers and physicists about the “Why is there Something rather than Nothing?” question, this is the perfect time for Jim Holt’s new book Why … Continue reading ?
This week at the University of Pittsburgh the Phenomenology 2012 Symposium has talks reviewing the current situation in particle physics phenomenology. Not much new, but there is one plenary talk on string phenomenology, Cumrun Vafa’s Stringy Predictions for Particle Physics. … Continue reading ?
Matt Strassler posts here about a recent panel discussion of phenomenologists talking about the implications of the latest results from the LHC. You can listen to the thing for yourself, and see what Matt has to say at his blog, … Continue reading ?
A while ago I wrote here about a recent “conference of Nobel Laureates” convened by Jeffrey Epstein in the Virgin Islands. This was based upon stories in boston.com (Boston Globe) and marketwatch.com (Wall Street Journal), which were based upon this … Continue reading ?
Recently US plans for the LBNE next-generation neutrino experiment have run into trouble finding room in projected HEP budgets. Today (via Emanuel Derman’s twitter feed), I learn of a promising new source of funding. A Forbes columnist reports here on … Continue reading ?
In the years leading up to the LHC, string phenomenologists were vocal about their hopes to use string theory to make predictions about what the LHC would see, despite a history of a quarter-century of failure on the prediction front. … Continue reading ?
I suppose I’m posting too much about this, but the ongoing fight over nothing between prominent physicists and philosophers strikes me as perhaps marking some kind of end-point in the multiverse-mania-driven decline of part of theoretical physics from a difficult, … Continue reading ?