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Not Even Wrong @notevenwrong
Joined March 2013
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New Post: Complexifying the Complex math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Complexifying the Complex

I’ve been working recently on trying to understand exactly how Wick rotation works in two-dimensional conformal field theory. There is an analog there of some of the issues with Wick rotation…

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New Post: The First AI QFT Textbook math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

The First AI QFT Textbook

The first surprise of this afternoon was finally finding an informed and sensible discussion of the implications of AI agents for hep-th research, in the form of a twitter thread by stringking42069…

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New Post: The Only Game in Town math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

The Only Game in Town

Warning: if you follow this blog, you’ve heard this many times before, so can move on to something more interesting now. There’s a video conversation between Brian Greene and Lenny Suss…

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New Post: The Floer Jungle math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

The Floer Jungle

There’s a remarkable new book out about the life and work of Andreas Floer, entitled The Floer Jungle, co-written by writer Siobhan Roberts (author of some great biographies of mathematicians…

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New Post: End of Civilization News math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

End of Civilization News

The big AI/math news is the release today of the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It’s an excellent attempt to identify the new threats to the intellectual cultu…

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New Post: This Week's Hype math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

This Week’s Hype

The usual string theory hype machine in action: to celebrate a PRL publication, a university press office puts out a press release full of hype with a highly misleading title (“string theory …

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New Post: Some Notes on AI math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Some Notes on AI

This posting is mainly intended to provide some links to material about AI in math and physics that I’ve found interesting. I confess that to a large degree I’m trying to avoid seriousl…

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New post: Wick Rotating Spinors and Twistors math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Wick Rotating Spinors and Twistors

A couple weeks ago I gave at talk in Marseille on the general topic of Wick Rotating Spinors and Twistors. I’ll make a few comments here on the content of the slides. The idea of the talk was…

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New post: Langlands Program 2.0 math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Langlands Program 2.0

Yesterday I was at Peter Scholze’s Seminaire Bourbaki talk, his write-up is available here. It was advertised as an exposition of the recent proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture, but P…

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New post: This Week’s Hype math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

This Week’s Hype

Natalie Wolchover at Quanta has an article about a campaign by string theorists to argue that we have to accept string theory as our theory of fundamental physics even though there is no evidence f…

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New post: Formalization of QFT? math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Formalization of QFT?

There’s a new paper out on the Formalization of QFT, purporting to formalize a QFT using Lean/Mathlib. I’ve been trying to avoid spending time on the hot topics of AI and theorem provin…

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New post: Twistors and Unification math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Twistors and Unification

The last few postings here have been about rather technical problems with the conventional understanding of how spacetime symmetries and Wick rotation work in the Standard Model. These were written…

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New post: Twistors and Wick Rotation math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Twistors and Wick Rotation

In the last posting I explained how a fundamental problem shows up if you try to Wick rotate a Weyl spinor. Wick rotation is supposed to be analytic continuation in a four dimensional complex space…

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New post: Weyl Spinor Fields and Right-handed Spacetime math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Weyl Spinor Fields and Right-handed Spacetime

In this post I’ll discuss Weyl spinor fields and explain why Wick-rotating a single Weyl spinor field appears to be impossible. This motivates a proposal for a different way of thinking about…

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New post: Lorentz versus Euclidean Symmetry math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Lorentz versus Euclidean Symmetry

Wick rotation changes the spacetime symmetries of a quantum field theory, changing between The Lorentz group, by which I’ll mean either $SO(3,1)$ or $SL(2,\mathbf C)$, the double cover of the…

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New post: Hyperfunctions math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Hyperfunctions

I’ve been trying to understand (not entirely successfully yet…) Wick rotation using hyperfunctions, which are a sort of distributions not as well-known as they should be. Some notes abo…

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New post: Osterwalder-Schrader and Euclidean Spinor Fields math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Osterwalder-Schrader and Euclidean Spinor Fields

If one tries to Wick rotate a quantum field theory with spinor fields, it’s well-known that problems arise, something first recognized in Schwinger’s earliest papers on the subject. I&#…

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New post: Harmonic Oscillators math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Harmonic Oscillators

This is related to the Osterwalder-Schrader posting, but is much, much more elementary. I’ll write up some basic facts about the quantum harmonic oscillator and explain what bothers me about …

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New post: Looks Like it is Happening… math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Looks Like it is Happening…

Update: Sorry, but a commenter points out that this may just be an artifact of counting based on when most recently modified, not on original submission date. Numbers using original, not most recen…

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New post: Osterwalder-Schrader math.columbia.edu/~woit/word…

Osterwalder-Schrader

I’ve been trying to write up some new ideas about Wick rotation for a long time now, keep getting stuck as it becomes clear at various points that I haven’t gotten to the bottom of what…

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