A few items on the science outreach front: The Oscars of Science were held Saturday night in Hollywood, with a long list of A-listers in attendance, led by Kim Kardashian. More here, here and here. You’ll be able to watch the whole thing on Youtube starting April 21. The World Science Festival will have some live programs here in New York May 30 – June 2. One of the programs will feature the physicists responsible for the Wormhole Publicity Stunt explaining how we may be able to create wormholes—tunnels through spacetime—in the laboratory. Stringking42069 is back on Twitter with his outre ..read more

This semester the KITP has been running a program asking What is String Theory?, which is winding up next week, and was promising to “arrive at a deeper answer to the question in the title.” It seems though that this effort has gone nowhere, with this report from the scene: Went to a string theory conference with many of the top researchers in the field centered around tackling the question “what is string theory” and the consensus after the conference was that nobody knows lmao For an answer to the question from someone with a lot more experience, I recently noticed that Lubos Motl is very ..read more

I don’t really have time to write seriously about this, and there’s a very good argument that this is a topic anyone with any sense should be ignoring, but I just can’t resist linking to the latest in the abc saga, the REPORT ON THE RECENT SERIES OF PREPRINTS BY K. JOSHI posted yesterday by Mochizuki. To summarize the situation before yesterday, virtually all experts in this subject have long ago given up on the idea that Mochizuki’s IUT theory has any hope of proving the abc conjecture. Back in 2018, after a trip to Kyoto to discuss in depth with Mochizuki, Scholze and Stix wrote up a documen ..read more

David Tong has produced a series of very high quality lectures on theoretical physics over the years, available at his website here. Recently a new set of lectures has appeared, on the topic of the Standard Model. Skimming through these, they look quite good, with explanations that are significantly more clear than found elsewhere. Besides recommending these for their clarity, I can’t help pointing out that there is one place early on where the discussion is confusing, at exactly the same point as in most textbooks, and exactly at the point that I’ve been arguing that something interesting is ..read more

I was very pleased to hear yesterday that this year’s Abel Prize has been awarded to Michel Talagrand. For more about Talagrand and his mathematics, see the Abel site, Quanta, NYT, Nature and elsewhere. Also, see lots of reactions on Twitter like this one. Almost exactly ten years ago I got an email from someone whose name I didn’t recognize, expressing interest in the notes I had made available online which would turn into the book on quantum mechanics. He was reading the notes and had some comments which he included, saying he thought they were trivial but maybe I would want to take a look ..read more

The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I started this up, blogging was all the rage, and lots of other blogs about fundamental physics were starting around the same time. Almost all of these have gone dormant, with Sabine Hossenfelder’s Backreaction one notable exception. She and some others (like Sean Carroll) have largely moved to video, which seems to be the thing to do to communicate with as many people as possible. There are people who do “m ..read more

I was assuming that Peter Scholze’s Emmy Noether lectures at the IAS would be the big news about advances in the Langlands program this coming week, but an anonymous correspondent just sent me this link. Tomorrow Andrew Wiles will be giving a talk in Oxford on “A New Approach to Modularity”, with abstract: In the 1960’s Langlands proposed a generalisation of Class Field Theory. I will review this and describe a new approach using the trace formua as well as some analytic arguments reminiscent of those used in the classical case. In more concrete terms the problem is to prove general modularit ..read more

Kind of like the last posting, but this time you get two worthwhile items to make up for one that’s not. Dan Garisto has a very good article here examining the present state of high energy experimental particle physics and phenomenology. He also summarizes current thoughts about the future. The CERN FCC-ee proposal is still in feasibility study mode, with the big problem its high cost. Numbers like \$15 – \$20 billion have shown up in press reports, and Garisto has “tens of billions”. The feasibility study is supposed to be finished late next year, and presumably a big part of it is people at ..read more

If I’m going to point to something about string theory and say the same things as always about it, seems best to first start with the opposite, an item about something really worth reading. This spring I’ve been teaching a graduate course aimed at getting to an explanation of the Standard Model aimed at mathematicians. The first few weeks have been about quantization and quantum mechanics, today I’m starting on quantum field theory, starting with developing the framework of non-relativistic QFT. While trying to figure out how best to pass from QM to QFT, I’ve kept coming across various aspect ..read more

New Scientist this week has a cover story I can strongly endorse, entitled Why physicists are rethinking the route to a theory of everything. It’s by journalist Michael Brooks, partly based on a long conversation we had a month or so ago. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, but I’ll provide a summary and some extracts here. For a more technical description of the ideas I’m pursuing that are discussed in the article, see this preprint, which was intended to be a very short and concise explanation of what I think is the most important new idea here. This semester I’m mainly working on teaching ..read more