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Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law

Peter Woit

3.93 · Rating details · 1,679 ratings · 68 reviews

At what point does theory depart the realm of testable hypothesis and come to resemble something like aesthetic speculation, or even theology? The legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a phrase for such ideas: He would describe them as "not even wrong," meaning that they were so incomplete that they could not even be used to make predictions to compare with observations t ...more

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Hardcover, 291 pages

Published September 4th 2006 by Basic Books (first published April 25th 2006)

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Jun 09, 2009 Manny rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: People skeptical of modern physics

Shelves: not-the-whole-truth, science, history-and-biography, multiverse

[Original review, June 2009]

Just looking at the title gives you a large clue as to what this book is about. Woit is covering a lot of the same ground as Smolin, in The Trouble with Physics . Both of them argue convincingly that fundamental physics has lost its way. Superstring theory has been around for over 20 years, and it hasn't delivered on its early promises. Here are what I saw as the main pieces of evidence:

1. Problems with supersymmetry. Every particle is supposed to have a supersymme ...more

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May 17, 2018 Jose Moa added it

Shelves: physics

This is not a comon popular science book,in fact it is in some chapters a extremely technical book ,in the frontiers of theoretical physics and mathematics,if one would like to have some remote idea of what is going on in that chapters one must have some idea of the concepts of classical lie groups and lie algebras,gauge groups,simple groups,conections in a differentiable manifold,algebraic topology invariants,knot polinomials,homotopy and so on.
Its to say,it is a book written by a physics mathe This is not a comon popular science book,in fact it is in some chapters a extremely technical book ,in the frontiers of theoretical physics and mathematics,if one would like to have some remote idea of what is going on in that chapters one must have some idea of the concepts of classical lie groups and lie algebras,gauge groups,simple groups,conections in a differentiable manifold,algebraic topology invariants,knot polinomials,homotopy and so on.
Its to say,it is a book written by a physics mathematician for theoretical physicians,disguised in popular science book,I suppose for be better sold.
In spite of all this,the spirit of the book is clear and the goal and some chapters very understandable.
The goal is to make scientific community aware of if the string theory being unable of make testable experimentally predictions and by that not verifiable and so ambiguous that so far it is not falsifiable,from here the title "Not Even Wrong",is not a dead end that is consuming most of the world theoretical physicists inteligence and efforts in a futil task and as a conscuence not explring alternative ways as for example loop quantum gravity.
Of course is very difficult for many people after many years of hard work recognice the useless of his task and give up.
But worst of all,the string theory have reached so level of esoteric,criptic,impenetrability that only a few people really knows what is consistent and what is nonsense as it was demostrated by the noted in the book "The Bodganov Affair" ,where in the book in page 223 textually says :"Why did the referees in this case accept for publication such obviously incoherent nonsense?.One reason is undoubtely that many physicists do not willingly admit that they dont understand things.Nothin published in this whole área really makes complete sense,so maybe this is not worse tan lots of other stuff and maybe there is even an inteligible idea in somewhere.Why not just accept it?"
A obvious paralelism with the Alan Sokal Affair.

A no highly readable accesible book,on the contrary yet with a clear and brave message and with some chapters readables and accesibles. ...more

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Oct 30, 2008 Trevor rated it did not like it

Shelves: science

I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to finish this one. It is too hard. It has been written about as badly as it is possible to write a book like this. Take this as a case in point:

“Mathematicians were much slower to appreciate the Dirac equation and it had little impact on mathematics at the time of its discovery. Unlike the case with the physicists, the equation did not immediately answer any questions that mathematicians had been thinking about. This began to change in the early 1960s, when the B I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to finish this one. It is too hard. It has been written about as badly as it is possible to write a book like this. Take this as a case in point:

“Mathematicians were much slower to appreciate the Dirac equation and it had little impact on mathematics at the time of its discovery. Unlike the case with the physicists, the equation did not immediately answer any questions that mathematicians had been thinking about. This began to change in the early 1960s, when the British mathematician Michael Atiyah and his American colleague Isadore Singer rediscovered the equation for themselves in their work on the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, one of the most important results of the latter half of the twentieth century.”

Ahh, yes, the old Atiyah-Singer index theorem – one of my favourites. No point in saying anything more about something quite so well known as the index theorem.

I was so looking forward to this book because I do think String Theory has a lot to answer for.

The title comes from a favourite saying of Wolfgang Pauli – but Woit even stuffs up this story. My favourite telling comes from In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat (at least, I think that is where I read it – it was a long time ago). This is my memory of the story, anyway. Pauli had some sort of illness (Parkinson’s? – I honestly can’t remember) and it had the unfortunate effect of making his head bob. He would sit listening to lectures by young Physicists and they would think they were making a wonderful impression on the great man as he sat there nodding along with them, all until he would suddenly jump up and say, “Wrong! Utterly false!”

Anyway, that was him on a good day. By far his worst criticism, which has become proverbial, was his saying to someone their theory was “Not even wrong!” That is, what they had said was nothing more than pure, blind speculation that could be neither proven nor disproven. Damning criticism indeed.

And that is what I was expecting this book to show about String Theory – that String Theory makes no predictions about the world that can be proven one way or the other and that therefore it too is not even wrong.

And I bet that is what this book gets around to saying – it is just that I found everything from about page 40 virtually completely incomprehensible. Admittedly, I was reading this one before going to sleep – but I really struggled with it. I’ve stopped at page 80 – not actually with blood coming out of my eyes, but close enough not want to go on. Roger Penrose calls it ‘Compulsive reading’ – but I suspect Roger may have less trouble with what I found were far too vague introductions to concepts like quantum theory. I think Roger may have been able to fill in the gaps more than I was able to do. Woit provides a very ‘geometric’ view of quantum theory, one I’ve never heard of before, and I admit it left me completely lost.

I was really looking forward to this one and I feel very let down by it. This might be a much better book than I found it to be – but I would suggest you will need quite a bit more physics to understand it than should be expected from the ‘general’ reader.

...more

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Jun 06, 2014 Daniel Shawen rated it it was amazing

This is a great book, even if it is a little dated.

I previously thought that I was the only one who ranted about things like the 'anthropic principle', which basically says: "If life were impossible, no one would know it." -- Captain Obvious Since when did a statement such as this become 'science'? It's a valid question.

Just like the (now Nobel-Laureate) Alan Guth's ideas about cosmic inflation: "There are no magnetic monopoles in our current universe, because once there were, but now the univer This is a great book, even if it is a little dated.

I previously thought that I was the only one who ranted about things like the 'anthropic principle', which basically says: "If life were impossible, no one would know it." -- Captain Obvious Since when did a statement such as this become 'science'? It's a valid question.

Just like the (now Nobel-Laureate) Alan Guth's ideas about cosmic inflation: "There are no magnetic monopoles in our current universe, because once there were, but now the universe is so diluted, there aren't any left." The same could be said about things like fairies, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, could it not?

Together with the ideas of Hume and Popper (which deny that science uses any measure or 'induction' process from previous established science including instrumentation, science itself seems to be very diluted these days.

Mathematics, and in particular, the mathematics associated with string theory, is however a good example of one of Popper's "unfalsifiable" ideas. When string theorists are told that two experiments demonstrate that a proton has not decayed since the beginning of the universe (14 billion years or so), there is no response. Just how long should we wait for it to decay then? Many of the precepts of string theory can never be tested on a practical basis. A collider with an energy of 10^16 GeV would be required to break apart one of their "strings" into whatever its constituent parts are. There aren't enough resources on this planet to build such a device, nor is there anything that energetic going on in the universe it is practical for us to observe. Moreover, some 20 or so 'free parameters' (fudge factors) exist in the current Standard Model (and many more in string theory, that must be individually adjusted in order to satisfy the conditions of the so-called 'anthropic principle' alone.

Peter Woit's book is a must read to see how much of the last 30 years of theoretical physics has been squandered by what appears to be the mathematical equivalent of superstition. Mathematics has at least one characteristic in common with all other human languages. Nonsensical or fictional expression will always be possible with any language, including that of mathematics if one is determined enough. There needs to be a balance struck between mathematics that is describing something that is real vs. mathematics that doesn't even come close to the mark, and also does little or nothing to advance our ability to model real situations, or the mathematics we may someday use in order to do so.

The development of the Amplitudihedron seems likely to be the only good thing that has come out of the branch of physics called string theory in over 30 years time, so perhaps it is time to give the subject a well deserved pause.

...more

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Mar 26, 2021 Rama Rao rated it liked it

Shelves: physics, science, physical-reality

A quarrel with physicists being lost in math

This is an interesting book by the Columbia University physicist Peter Woit who started a war of words with string physics community. String theory is purely mathematical and speculative that lacks testable predictions. The theory is largely unverified despite that it attempts to unify theory of relativity (physical reality at large scales) and quantum physics (physical reality at subatomic scales). The quantum field theory explains the behavior of el A quarrel with physicists being lost in math

This is an interesting book by the Columbia University physicist Peter Woit who started a war of words with string physics community. String theory is purely mathematical and speculative that lacks testable predictions. The theory is largely unverified despite that it attempts to unify theory of relativity (physical reality at large scales) and quantum physics (physical reality at subatomic scales). The quantum field theory explains the behavior of elementary particles, and three of the four forces of nature. The Einstein’s general relativity explains the fourth force, gravity that becomes relevant at much larger scales. These two theories are logically and mathematically incompatible. String theory proposes to solve this problem by replacing elementary particles with strings as nature’s most fundamental entities. Therefore a “Theory of Everything” was needed to fully describe the physical reality we observe and experience. But string theory, unlike Einstein’s relativity, is not a specific set of equations, but rather a framework, or a class of equations of a particular style.

Since string theory is not experimentally verified, the author calls this a failure, and criticize this as arrogance of physicists for promoting this for the last four decades. He has urged federal agencies like the National Science Foundation to cut funding for research in string physics. After more than a decade, he still thinks string theory is a gory mess. Most string theorists have gone back to their work undeterred by Woit’s criticism. Some compared him to a terrorist and even called an “incompetent, power-thirsty moron” and a “stuttering crackpot-in-chief.” This is an odd mix of intellectual jousting. His moderated weblog on string theory and other topics titled "Not Even Wrong" is still active on his Columbia University webpage. It continues to be widely read by physicists and mathematicians and still open for debate.

Part of the book feeds on drama. Superstring theory explains things like multiverse and brings in new ideas for the fact that space and time is not limited to one universe such as ours. Space can expand and contract at much faster speed than the speed of light, and it does not require energy for its expansion. In addition, mathematical correspondence discovered by Princeton physicist Juan Maldacena implies that string theory has deep mathematical connections to quantum field theory. Peter Woit doesn’t give enough credit to a whole bunch of interesting things about quantum field theories that we’ve learned from string theory. I caution that some of the chapters are technical but there is also interesting take-home message from this book. His most recent blog written on Marc h 24, 2021 still makes an interesting point.
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Nov 05, 2014 Cara rated it it was amazing

I'm not even going to pretend I understand string theory well enough to have an independent opinion on whether it's right or wrong, or even a decent theory or not. I've read pro-string theory books (Brian Greene's are my favorite) and enjoyed them, but this book makes a pretty good argument that string theory is "not even wrong" (i.e. not scientific enough to be wrong). It's not an easy book to read, but even if the math and physics portions fly way over your head (which they will unless you you ...more

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Jun 09, 2012 Eric rated it really liked it

A fascinating book criticizing the institution that is String Theory. The central question here is whether string theory deserves the attention and man hours it receives, and moreover, whether elegance and mathematical beauty are necessities of a scientific theory. He makes a convincing case that string theory fails the most basic test of scientific knowledge: can the theory be proven wrong? We never really know if a theory is "true," so the best we can do, as scientists, is to say a theory is " ...more

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Dec 27, 2010 Ushan rated it it was ok

The first part of this book is a very well-written brief history of particle physics in the past century. The second part is a rant about string theory, which is not even wrong, and string theorists, who engage in mental masturbation. Well, Kip Thorne thinks otherwise; now, who is Peter Woit and who is Kip Thorne?

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Mar 31, 2014 Herb Sonny rated it it was amazing

In this well-written and technically accurate book Woit takes 40-year old string theory out to the woodshed for not having any physical demonstrations of its application to the real world. The hidden cost of continuing to fund the string theory conjecture (not a theory) is that it takes the lion's share of physics research funding at the expense of funding for research in other fields. ...more

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Mar 12, 2021 Raghu rated it really liked it

When scientists propose a ‘Theory of Everything’, we expect it to be an all-encompassing theory. It must explain all known phenomena and make new predictions in the domains we are researching. In Physics, scientists believe String Theory is a ‘theory of everything’. It provides a framework, combining quantum mechanics and classical physics into a unified approach that explains the laws of the universe. However, many other physicists, the author of this book included, think this theory cannot qua ...more

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Apr 01, 2019 Michael Huang rated it liked it

Written by mathematician Woit, the book took on the subject of (super)string theories that are supposed to unified general relativity and quantum mechanics. The rating has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself, but a result of a serious "impedance mismatch" between the book and me. The concepts themselves (gauge theory, SU groups, etc.) are non-trivial and there is no way Woit can make it completely clear to laymen what physicists took years to master. But if you use blackboxes as a ...more

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Dec 29, 2011 Iain rated it liked it

Chiefly interesting as a mathematician's, rather than a physicist's, view of the string theory controversy (has it failed? is it even a science?) The structure is a bit loose—it begins as a fairly detailed history of quantum field theory, then after assessing string theory it ends with a series of random essays—but it's full of intriguing anecdotes throughout. The mathematical detail is very heavy going, but the suggestions for further reading (both heavier and lighter) are excellent.

Overall, no ...more

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Apr 04, 2022 Pavan Dharanipragada added it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, science

This is severe criticism of the particle theory field, a field I'm part of, even though I do not work with string theory, directly at least, (and I hope I don't have to either). It is a sore spot for many giants in my field, and they usually are very ungracious about it.

String theory is daunting. I attended one course on it, and while I didn't pay as much attention as I should have, it is not really all that beautiful, which this book also contends. The book came out in 2006, and while there wa This is severe criticism of the particle theory field, a field I'm part of, even though I do not work with string theory, directly at least, (and I hope I don't have to either). It is a sore spot for many giants in my field, and they usually are very ungracious about it.

String theory is daunting. I attended one course on it, and while I didn't pay as much attention as I should have, it is not really all that beautiful, which this book also contends. The book came out in 2006, and while there was no clean break with string theory since then, it does seem like the particle physics community has sort of given up on it. The hottest field is no longer superstring theory or string field theory or whatever. Holography, quantum information, scattering amplitudes, etc., apart from string theory itself, of course.

But , apart from being mostly independent from string theory, these other fields have nothing to offer in terms of falsifiability either. And, the fields offered by the author as worthwhile alternatives, such as Loop Quantum Gravity, have simply never failed to take off.

Despite a lot of real and necessary criticism that the author directs at string theory and the theoretical particle physics community, I believe if there were more worthwhile theories around to work on, the community would slowly but surely direct its energies towards those. I do not think the field is that much beholden to the miscalculations of the leaders and groupthink that it would prevent the community to ignore worthy ideas.

The lack of big experimental anomalies is a big bummer and it's going to be that way for a long times. So, I think the author's criticisms are valid, and many particle physicists are taking them seriously enough. Meanwhile, maybe fewer graduate students should be admitted into the field to reduce the severe competition resulting from there being only few permanent jobs in the field. This is one criticism that there seems to be no acknowledgement of.

There are parts of the book that are repetitive, and there is stuff about the Bogadanov affair that tries to make a larger point about the inscrutability and failing standards of the field as a science. I think the latter should be a bigger indication of the journal system being a huge scam rather than string theory being a huge scam. A lot of papers are churned out all the time that don't deserve to be papers, but most of these don't get attention and that's that. There is no point in lamenting their having been published.

One part I like about the book is its form. String theory is discussed quite late into the book. A significant chunk of the book, most of the first half, is devoted to exposition on Quantum Field Theory, the experimental breakthroughs that guided it, the mathematics involved in it. All of it is quite good, and there's also some stuff on more advanced mathematics, which also is very interesting. It makes for a compelling narrative of the field, though invoked as a setup for the repudiation of the more recent endeavours of the field. ...more

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Jan 06, 2015 Yasiru rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I didn't expect this to be as quick a read as it was (it might have helped that I read Frenkel's Love and Math prior to this and had the likes of SU(3) swimming through my head). It's certainly technical in parts, but doesn't go into too much detail (I don't recall seeing an actual equation).

The kind of technical things it mentions seem addressed to the physics community where readers would be able to fill in details from a bird's eye view kind of argument. One reviewer here voiced complaint tha I didn't expect this to be as quick a read as it was (it might have helped that I read Frenkel's Love and Math prior to this and had the likes of SU(3) swimming through my head). It's certainly technical in parts, but doesn't go into too much detail (I don't recall seeing an actual equation).

The kind of technical things it mentions seem addressed to the physics community where readers would be able to fill in details from a bird's eye view kind of argument. One reviewer here voiced complaint that no explanation of what the exactly the Atiyah-Singer index theorem is was forthcoming, but I don't think even a rough idea of this kind of abstract result can be communicated to anyone's benefit given the space restrictions.
This is the closest to an effective exposition I've found, but it doesn't even try to encompass the full generality of the theorem- http://www.quora.com/How-would-you-in...

For the maths of group representations, this video might be helpful- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWhQA...
As would be the aforementioned Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality.

The first couple of chapters describing the standard model and where particle accelerators come in and the last few (including one about the Bogdanov affair) are much lighter and read like the popular science most of us are used to.

The reason I've come short a star in the rating is because I have some philosophical sympathy for Susskind's position. Things might in fact not turn out to be as clean and tractable as we'd like and anthropic reasoning might be inevitable. Woit has convinced me to have a read of Weyl, but I'm not convinced there are guarantees. Though on the other hand, some of the research programmes noted as alternatives to string theory (though unfortunately not discussed at any appreciable depth), like that of Connes, sound fascinating.

An unforeseen consequence of my reading Not Even Wrong (the title is from Pauli and resonates with the thought of one of my favourite philosophers- Karl Popper), is that it made me curious about what string theory looks like (as a formalism). All this time, popular accounts gave me the impression that the main appeal of string theory was a degree of mathematical elegance and generality, but Woit (who works in a maths department) seems to contradict this. No doubt supersymmetry and M-theory are heavy going (my grasp even of their nature as described here being very tenuous), but they are at least fruitful exercises in geometry, one hopes.

What seems another important side to the story of modern physics is the role of information and computation. This is a complicated story, but these slides suggest some of the possibilities- http://www.theory.caltech.edu/~preski...
as does Scott Aaronson's Quantum Computing since Democritus, though it takes a complexity theorist's point of view.

Finally, it should be said that the most important contribution of Woit's book might be a social one, in that it not only questions the intellectual honesty of the orthodoxy but is also critical of the practices in academia that let theorists avoid due reflection. A significant part of the problem appears to be the failure of administrative policy (which controls grants, post-doctorate positions, etc.) to see that plurality and a critical attitude are what help science thrive. This is also a widespread problem of public perception to be overcome more generally. The difficulty is in part due to relaxing the emphasis that 'science is hard' for the sake of popularisation (ruminating 'how pretty the sky looks!' with different kinds of imaging seems to be many a lay person's idea of science). There aren't any easy answers to this conundrum, but having society learn to think critically seems doubtless part of the eventual answer, which brings us back to the titular Pauli quote and category mistakes. ...more

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Nov 15, 2014 Noreen added it

Shelves: science

"…[H]ow can one separate out what is legitimately science from what is irrational wishful thinking…?" (loc. 3802)

Good question, but as an answer this book was far too technical for me. I read what I could comprehend and scanned the rest. Whenever the author described what he was about to present as "simple," I could be assured I wouldn't understand a word that followed. Once I started skipping the hard parts I got through the book fairly quickly. I managed to get through part of the third chapte "…[H]ow can one separate out what is legitimately science from what is irrational wishful thinking…?" (loc. 3802)

Good question, but as an answer this book was far too technical for me. I read what I could comprehend and scanned the rest. Whenever the author described what he was about to present as "simple," I could be assured I wouldn't understand a word that followed. Once I started skipping the hard parts I got through the book fairly quickly. I managed to get through part of the third chapter before I was forced to scan. In Chapter 13, the author returns to language I can understand.

What I did get is that superstring theory, though it contains no equations, makes no falsifiable predictions, and in fact can't even be tested, has managed to survive far longer than other failed theories. Its popularity has persisted for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the sunk cost fallacy. I study a bit on critical thinking, and brilliant people aren't immune to self-delusion. Unfortunately it's a brain drain as brilliant young students continue to pursue this ethereal concept at the expense of other, possibly more fruitful avenues.

The arguments made by string theory proponents are much like those made by postmodernists, or by true believers in magic, supernatural deities, or other woo. Science is supposed to filter out this sort of mush. Yes, many scientific theories that we now accept as good science began as speculation, but they made testable predictions, and as finer instrumentation allowed for better observations, if they were good, the data supported them. However, string theory by most definitions doesn't even qualify as a theory -- or even science. You might as well argue for intelligent design -- or homeopathy.

As someone with virtually no training in math and physics I found this book mostly incomprehensible. For an accessible general interest book on the subject matter I recommend Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23.... Ferris seems partial to superstring, but he wrote the book when the theory was new and sexy. Many of the same people and concepts are introduced, but in an entertaining, "light on science" manner. It goes back further in history for a look at many other fascinating but failed hypotheses. A book that many reviewers recommend as an alternative for the less physics literate is Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics.

This book is dated as well. Since its writing, the Large Hadron Collider has been built, and observations such as the Higgs boson and gravitational waves have been made. I'm not qualified to know whether the new findings have had any bearing on superstring or any other theories. But I'm not sure I want to read more arguments about it. This book, what I could understand of it anyway, was pretty convincing.

Later chapters address string theory adherents' opposition to Woit's stance and his difficulty finding a publisher. He compares the string theory movement as it grows ever older and shakier to a cult or a religion, and he gives many examples as evidence. He hints that there's even a conspiracy aspect to it. He doesn't seem prone to exaggerate, so I checked out the one-star reviews of this book on Amazon. One particularly vituperative one, which equates Woit's arguments to those of William Dembski (the inventor of "Intelligent Design"), was written by this guy: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lubo%C5%.... Thanks, Motl! Though a bad argument against a view doesn't constitute support for it, behavior like yours is useful to the rational side.

I don't feel qualified to rate this book since I'm not its intended audience. I think someone who gives a book that he or she doesn't understand five stars is as dishonest as the referees who allow incoherent nonsense to be published in peer-reviewed journals. (See Chapter 15, "The Bogdanov Affair.") I probably wouldn't have chosen to read it on my own -- my book group voted for it. Does no stars count as a rating? (According to a comment by one "Lobstergirl" on a Goodreads discussion board, the answer is no, so that's what I'm giving it.) ...more

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Feb 11, 2016 Dennis Swanger rated it liked it

I bought this book in the hope of gaining some understanding of what string theory is all about. Three weeks and 267 pages later, I know little more than when I started the book. Granted, one of the author's principal goals was to offer a condemnation of string theory as unscientific, and in this he succeeds. Scientific theories must be tested by experiments; to date, string theory hasn't proposed a single experiment to validate its authenticity. The string theory practitioners are, according to ...more

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Sep 03, 2019 Dennis Littrell rated it really liked it

Why postmodernists love string theory

This came out the same year that Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics (2006) and it carries the same message, namely that particle physicists need to move away from string theory because it is beginning to look like it isn’t valid science. The main point in both books is that after two or three decades of work on string theory—or superstring theory, M-theory, brane theory, etc.—string theorists are unable to make any predictions that can be scientifically te Why postmodernists love string theory

This came out the same year that Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics (2006) and it carries the same message, namely that particle physicists need to move away from string theory because it is beginning to look like it isn’t valid science. The main point in both books is that after two or three decades of work on string theory—or superstring theory, M-theory, brane theory, etc.—string theorists are unable to make any predictions that can be scientifically tested.

The deep problem for the reader of either book is that only particle physicists themselves can know whether progress is being made. For the rest of us we have to accept what they say on—dare I use the word?—faith. Without empirical support string theory is, as Woit has it, “Not Even Wrong” (the phrase is from Wolfgang Pauli).

The Preface and the first two chapters up to page 29 are eminently readable and interesting. Starting with Chapter 3 “Quantum Theory” the book becomes difficult and continues to be more than challenging until Chapter 13 “On Beauty and Difficulty” beginning on page 193 where it becomes readable again. The problem? With or without mathematics it really is impossible to make particle physics understandable to a general readership. Woit tries to make QM and string theory clear without equations and I give him credit for trying. But it is the nature of modern science but especially of something like particle physics that it is impossible to really grasp the subject without years of study.

Perhaps the beginnings of trouble for particle physics began in May, 1963 when P.A.M. Dirac famously said “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” (p. 195) This view, shared in some respects by Einstein, is the source of the problem today. While it turned out to be true that some mathematical equations that came before experimental support back in the grand old days of physics proved to be valid many did not. And of course it was understood that experimental support would have to follow otherwise the beautiful math would have to be put aside as wrong, arbitrary or perhaps not even wrong. The interesting thing about the equations in string theory, according to Woit, is that they are not beautiful. (p. 196) I would hasten to point out that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder and such claims really get to the heart of the matter: without experimental proof or predictive power, it really doesn’t matter from a scientific point of view whether the math is all that beautiful or not.

Woit goes into the politics and economics of present day particle physics with his main point being string theorists control access to all the good jobs and that furthermore once you’re on the string theory path it is hard to get off because of the enormous commitment in terms of time and energy required. So those people in string theory tend to support the theory despite its lack of empirical support because it is their livelihood and they have almost nowhere else to go because as Woit says, “It’s the only game in town” (see Chapter 16). Woit compares string theory to postmodern theory in its arrogance saying that “In both cases, there are practitioners that revel in the difficulty and obscurity of their research, often being overly impressed with themselves because of this. The barriers to understanding what this kind of work entails make it very hard for any outsiders to evaluate what, if anything, has been achieved.” (p. 202)

The title of the next chapter is “Is Superstring Theory Science?” and Woit’s answer is no. He writes, “…superstring theory is at the moment unarguably an example of a theory that can’t be falsified, since it makes no predictions.” (p. 207) I would add that this is similar to so-called Intelligent Design, another “theory” that fails because it can’t be falsified. This in a nutshell is why string theory is not science. Here is the situation: you have a “theory,” an edifice of equations and ideas about reality. You have an insolated and esoteric cadre of high priests who are the only ones that have access to this “knowledge,” and you have to take their word for it being true since they can’t prove it. Maybe it is true, maybe it isn’t. Maybe God did part the waters and maybe the Pope really is infallible in certain matters. But without experimental support none of this is science.

Woit goes on to remind us of “the Bogdanov affair” in which some string theory mumble jumble got past some peer review journal editors. This sort of thing, reminiscent of the Sokal Hoax from a few years back, suggests that things are indeed getting lax in the same way that postmodern literary journals can be lax since so much of what is expressed is either arbitrary or simply a matter of opinion without any sort of scientific rigor.

Woit even cites an anonymous scientist as saying that there is a string theory “mafia” in charge of the physic departments in our prestigious universities (p. 223). On the next page he has an “excitable” “Harvard faculty member” say that “those who criticized the funding of superstring theory were terrorists who deserved to be eliminated by the U.S. military.” Woit adds, “I’m afraid he seemed to be serious about this.” (p. 224)

I have read books by renowned physicists Leonard Susskind and Brian Greene in which they come out strongly in support of string theory and hopeful that it will someday gain some experimental proof or be formulated in such a way that predictions can be made. But to be candid I feel they are in the unfortunate position of people who have to justify a lifetime of work otherwise admit that they might have better spent their time in other pursuits. The cognitive dissonance they face is difficult to resolve even for august scientists. Richard Feynman is quoted on page 246 as saying, “String theorists make excuses, not predictions.”

Okay, why does this really matter? It matters because this unscientific approach from string theory gives aid and comfort to not only postmodernists who believe that all of science is merely a social construction but also to creationists who can now claim that string theory and their intelligent design theory are similar in that neither one is falsifiable. If this is the case, by what authority do we choose one and not the other? In other words, a non-falsifiable string theory is a retreat from science into something akin to religion.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
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May 12, 2009 Peter rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, science, physics

The most powerful and convincing criticism of string theory I've ever seen. Not a good introduction to the subject - as an engineer with several pop physics books under my belt, I was dangling by a finger for most of the time I was reading. But it's rewarding and edifying, and provides an answer to the person who reads The Elegant Universe and then talks about it at parties (I admit this with sadness, being the prime example of that flavor of asininity). ...more

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Aug 25, 2018 Luca Campobasso rated it it was amazing

Shelves: physics

TLDR1: I'm a Physics student, this book is valid.
TLDR2: If you are not a student of math or physics, don't read the math parts, it won't make any sense to you. If you want to know his arguments about ST, just read from Ch. 11.

This book is exactly what is says on the cover, a critics to String Theory.

I just finished a String theory course in my university (I'm a graduate student in Physics), and I really liked it, so I was wondering whether I should get to know it more. Does this book provide so TLDR1: I'm a Physics student, this book is valid.
TLDR2: If you are not a student of math or physics, don't read the math parts, it won't make any sense to you. If you want to know his arguments about ST, just read from Ch. 11.

This book is exactly what is says on the cover, a critics to String Theory.

I just finished a String theory course in my university (I'm a graduate student in Physics), and I really liked it, so I was wondering whether I should get to know it more. Does this book provide some solid critics to it?

Since I was interested only in the part against String Theory, I read chapters 1 and 2, skipped the rest and read from the 11th chapter onwards. That is the interesting part, because the rest is interesting only if you want to know more about modern physics, QM, Standard model, and so on.

In fact, if you are NOT acquainted with modern physics, you should skip the more technical parts, indicated in some parts by "mathematical digression", it will spoil the reading in my opinion, i.e., it will make you tired of it very quickly. You don't need any math here.

I do like his intellectual honesty, which perspires from his reading, and in fact I do almost completely agree with most of his arguments against research in ST (mostly concentrated in Ch. 12 and 13). Maybe at some point I will write a more complete review with bullet points argument by argument.

In my understanding, what we can take out of ST are the mathematical methods used in it, as he also mentions talking about the fact that ST took theoretical physics and mathematics closer. This is also the reason why I took the course in the first place. I wanted to see what's all the fuss about the subject, and why people say it's beautiful. It indeed is. For the moment I just cannot like the idea of supersymmetry, which I find ridiculous. Isn't there any other way to include fermions in the theory, I wonder?

I do like the fact that his arguments are logically connected. About his writing, it's very clear and I can see it was edited very well, usually mathematicians are not champions of clarity. In fact as a physics student I often do struggle in reading their manuscripts. ...more

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Dec 08, 2019 Sebastian rated it really liked it

Whenever I dare feel that I might have an extremely-rough-but-otherwise-solid grasp of high-level physics along comes someone like Woit with a pair of steel-capped boots aimed straight at my gonads. He goes in deep into the fundamental issues and the background of modern physical theory, offering a rather thorough overview and history of modern quantum field theories from a mathematician’s standpoint rooted in geometry and topology. I hung in there for a while, I really did, I know what an algeb Whenever I dare feel that I might have an extremely-rough-but-otherwise-solid grasp of high-level physics along comes someone like Woit with a pair of steel-capped boots aimed straight at my gonads. He goes in deep into the fundamental issues and the background of modern physical theory, offering a rather thorough overview and history of modern quantum field theories from a mathematician’s standpoint rooted in geometry and topology. I hung in there for a while, I really did, I know what an algebra is, I can mess around with them, I even know what a symmetry, a group, or a representation are, but even so at one point I just had to throw in the towel and start glossing over all the technical details waiting for the talk to return to more understandable ground.

This is definitely not your average popular science book, and it may even be debatable whether it is popular science at all despite containing no actual math or physics (as in – equations, derivations, etc.), but I do get why he did what he did. He dared touch a hornets’ nest and he had to throw up a very solid defense against those same hornets responding with “oh, you just don’t understand what you are talking about”, but damn did that approach produce a book with a demanding entry threshold (and from what I gather, some hornets tried the response anyway).

Outside that historical overview of the development of modern physics he does present some considerably more readable chapters on philosophy and sociology of science that aim to wrestle with the question of whether string theory is... well, anything at all, other than a clunky mathematical construct with no relations to actual physical reality and why it has become the mainstream. Some of his questions have been answered in the meantime, what with the LHC becoming operational and hitting on the famed Higgs boson, and I get the impression that strings have lost some of their shine in the meantime, but it is nevertheless a fascinating read about some very smart people being, well, people, and about all the problems that modern cutting edge physics has to face after being too successful for its own good. ...more

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Jan 28, 2018 Terry rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, 2017, science, non-fiction, physical-book

This book is a devastating takedown of string theory/theories in all of their current forms. The author starts with a walk through the state of standard model as well as its apparent free parameters (values that need to be empirically measured and don't seem to be determinable from first principles). The author talks about the various mis-steps in the development of the standard model and questions it leaves unanswered. Then the rest of the book is discussion of the largest contenders to extend/ ...more

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Jan 06, 2021 V P rated it really liked it

Fairly solid book on the criticism of and demystification of the string theory cult or image. I believe the the first half of the book is a much perfunctory and history leading up to and explain particle and superstring theory. While most of the 2nd half is all the criticism of why string theory has failed, hint/spoilers, there is no experimental evidence for it, shocking.

The first half of the book has a lot of introductory ideas like history, how experimental particle colliders works, as well a ...more

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Apr 08, 2021 Anthony Friscia rated it liked it

Shelves: science-physics, math

Probably closer to 3.5 stars. Many ages ago, when I was a wee lad, I wanted to be a physicist. I grew up near the largest particle accelerator at the time (Fermilab’s Tevatron) and took classes there. I thought I would grow up and whirl those protons round and round and smash them together. When I got to college I was lazy, and didn’t work hard enough at maths, and there went my physics career. I regret this, but I still find physics, and math, fascinating. This book makes me want to go learn mo ...more

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Apr 15, 2021 Dale Grauman rated it liked it

Shelves: 2021-real-books

Well over half of this book attempts to provide a popularly accessible treatment particle physics. I give this material two stars at best. I found it completely impenetrable. You might fair better if you already have some background in physics. The book either needed to be much longer to teach the difficult concepts more thoroughly for non-scientists, or it could have been much shorter and just black-boxed most of the complex ideas.

The parts of the book that are about the problems with string th ...more

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Aug 27, 2018 esplovago rated it really liked it

Shelves: physics, owned-eng, mathematics

Good review of the current status of String Theory in particular about its unsolved problems. The first one is that it is not a theory but a set of hints and hopes that a theory may exists.

Definitively worth reading for understanding why a large part of the theoretical physics community has been probably on the wrong track for a lot of years.

"More than twenty years of intensive research by thousands of the best scientists in the world producing tens of thousands of scientific papers has not led ...more

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Nov 02, 2017 Stephen H rated it really liked it

A great treatment of modern particle physics, but Woit seems to leave out a lot of other grand mysteries such as time, general relativity, and entanglement. But that is OK.

Highly critical, and fairly so, of string theory.

More advanced than most other popular physics books, but Woit seems to know this and keeps things simple.

Great stories of some personalities too.

All in all a good, deep (if somewhat harder) read.

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Aug 31, 2020 Varun Chauhan rated it it was amazing

Book highlights major issues plaguing theoretical physics and the desperate need to change the way physicist are headed.Our obsession with beauty of mathematics but a theory that isnt even falsifiable.Book provides how physics is currently being done which is very counter productive to understanding the universe.The idea we dont understand anything because the universe is the way it is and plus the terrible idea of anthropic principle.

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Oct 27, 2020 Manuel rated it liked it · review of another edition

Wish I could give this book at least 4 stars, but I can't. I don't think this is a bad book. The problem is that it's a very technical book (particularly the middle chapters), way way outside of my abilities as a layman. I lost count of how many pages I simply plowed through, completely lost as to what I was reading. Therefore, I can't sing its praises. Although I suspect that what it says is extremely important. ...more

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Jan 23, 2020 Chronic Dean rated it it was amazing

When all you have in your toolkit is a hammer everything looks like a nail. I hope the final solution to the riddle of dark matter is not just another stupid particle. Lets have some fun. Fortune favors the bold. Sabine should be the first to occupy the revolving departmental chair of faculty critic in the physics department. Maybe the solution is magic, or art , or AI. Lets get it on.

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Jun 29, 2017 Vance J. rated it really liked it

A fascinating read. Brought into focus what I've been thinking for many years: that string theory is more a philosophy than science. After over 40 years of string theory, there has not yet been one testable hypothesis...and doesn't appear that there will be. ...more

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