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

Peter Woit

3.92 · Rating details · 1,456 ratings · 52 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: science, history-and-biography, multiverse, not-the-whole-truth

[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 supersymmetr ...more

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Nov 04, 2018 Manuel Antão rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2006

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

B+SB+B+HPπ = Heaven: "Not Even Wrong" by Peter Woit

(Original Review, 2006)

Peter Woit: “Wow it seems this is a contentious subject with many different views . My two pence worth bearing in mind I am no butcher. Well, the bacon should be good quality from a real butchers, rind on unsmoked. The Bread? Another issue with many counter arguments but for me a good quality sliced white; Jacksons make my favourite lightly buttered.

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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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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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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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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.

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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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Jan 06, 2015 Yasiru (reviews will soon be removed and linked to blog) 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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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).

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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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Jan 28, 2018 Terry rated it really liked it

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

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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Aug 27, 2018 Stefano rated it really liked it

Shelves: owned-eng, physics, 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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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.

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Aug 29, 2018 Jingsheng rated it really liked it

Shelves: science

No matter you agree or disagree, the first 2/3 part of this book is clearly written.
The last part is too much about reality and personal politics, you could, and in fact should simply ignore.

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Sep 09, 2010 Sarah rated it it was ok

Shelves: physics, science, nonfiction, string-theory, math

Kind of disappointed by this one. I recently read Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions as part of an effort to read some books that have been sitting on my to-read shelf for quite a while, and because of when it was published, it's full of references to all kinds of theoretical questions that could be answered by the then-soon-to-activate Large Hadron Collider. Well, the LHC has been operating for the better part of a decade by now, and although we're pre Kind of disappointed by this one. I recently read Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions as part of an effort to read some books that have been sitting on my to-read shelf for quite a while, and because of when it was published, it's full of references to all kinds of theoretical questions that could be answered by the then-soon-to-activate Large Hadron Collider. Well, the LHC has been operating for the better part of a decade by now, and although we're pretty sure it's allowed us to confirm existence of the Higgs boson, it hasn't seemed to show us extra dimensions or new supersymmetric particles or any other clues that string theory is on the right track. Indeed, it mostly seems to be providing observations in line with the boring old Standard Model. So I was hoping that by reading this book, I might get an idea of where physics could go from here. I was also intrigued by the author's idea that the best fruits of string theory so far might actually be found in the field of mathematics, and I was hoping to understand that better. Unfortunately, after reading the whole book, I didn't feel any more enlightened than I had after reading the cover flap. The author made points that seemed to me to be fair criticisms of string theory - e.g. it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, it's often said to be simple and beautiful but it really isn't, etc. - but I couldn't for the life of me understand the technical details he provided in support. And I remain lost at sea as to where mathematics was before string theory and what new...understandings? techniques? we have now. Maybe I just don't have sufficient background knowledge of the subjects - but I don't know, I've been exposed to the Standard Model and the history of its development in several different tellings, and this was one of the least comprehensible versions I've read. So I'm inclined to think that it must be possible to create more lucid and accessible explanations of the topics that are less familiar to me as well. Too bad I didn't find what I was looking for here. ...more

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Jul 06, 2013 Ben rated it really liked it

A good dissenting voice against the majority string theory hype in pop sci. Since it came out a decade ago in 2006, it's interesting to see how the various references to future experiments at the LHC have played out, mainly in Woit's favor.

First half is a zippy recap of particle physics theory & experimental validation over the past decades, with the detail growing thicker as Woit approaches the present. If, like me, you're not already familiar with ideas & terminology in this area, this ...more

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May 07, 2012 Carmen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: hard-sciences

The first chapters are extremely technical so you are likely to skip them if you are not a specialist. I found the last chapters interesting, which contained the criticism of String Theory.
To be honest, I found these criticisms to be rooted in the lack of imagination that often characterizes experimentalists, though the author is a mathematician. He claims that String Theory is not a science because it makes no predictions, but later goes on to say that mathematics does not make predictions eit ...more

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Apr 05, 2011 Bojan Tunguz rated it it was amazing

I've been following the arguments made by Peter Woit against String Theory for quite some time, and it's a pleasure to be able to have them all in a single volume. His arguments are very persuasive, and his writing clear and to the point. This, however, is not a book that the general audience will find easy to follow. The earlier chapters recount the canonical story of the success of the particle physics in the 20th century, and if you are familiar with that story you can safely skip these chapt ...more

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Mar 05, 2015 P D rated it liked it

I wanted to like this book so much, because it offers factual backing for my personal dislike of string theory (saying it's hand-waving is a far cry from being able to say why it's hand-waving)...but even with Woit's attempts to simplify information, I think I would have gotten a lot more out of this if I had taken linear algebra. Of course, since I haven't taken linear algebra, this might not be the right math, but the point remains that single-variable calculus eleven years ago doesn't prepare ...more

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Sep 30, 2011 Kiri rated it liked it

This was particularly useful to me, although to be frank I ended up paging past entire sections that were over my head. As physics overviews for the layman go, this is one math and concept intensive tour du force... and yet I felt like it gave me an insight into particle physics that I've never gotten from the many many other books on the subject that I've read - specifically because it gave me even this tiny glimpse into the mathematics of the subject, and how important that has been in the evo ...more

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Jan 24, 2008 Justin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: roughly-math-science

Woit has some issues with the general approach of string theorists, which he's only partially successful in countering. He does raise some compelling arguments relating to the failed science and, surprisingly the elegance of the theory.

The second half is a big payoff, but the first -- focused on the interwoven history of mathematics and physics in the 20th Century -- was a bit of a trial for me. Woit could be clearer in his explanations (although admittedly a novice like me is probably not his ...more

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Apr 17, 2015 Ian Murray-Watson rated it liked it

Not in my view a book for the layman. I've read many books on quantum theory in which the basic idea are far better explained for non-physicists (and non-mathematicians). He frequently uses the phrase "in a sense" as in "A is in a sense the negative of B" - so often that one wants to scream 'in what sense>?' or 'is it or isn't it?' Still, he makes his main points convincingly, and although the book is now seriously out of date, time seems only to have proved him right. Also quite good as a so ...more

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Mar 01, 2010 Tim rated it really liked it

Yet another attempt to explain 20th/21st c. physics in a no-math way to a non-technical audience, with the usual less-than-satisfactory results. It's basically an impossible task, but this one seems to do better than most. By which I mean that I was left with the pleasant sensation that I understood....something. At least for a while.

Like Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics" this physicist is a skeptic about String Theory which has become the dominant sub-field in physics in US academia in r ...more

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Jan 09, 2008 Jon Larimer rated it liked it

It took me a while to get through this. I read a bunch of other popular-physics books from Kaku, Greene, et al, mostly very pro-string theory, and they were much more accessible. There are a few concepts I had trouble with, but it didn't really detract from the overall message of the book.

Woit comes from a math background so he has an outsider's perspective on string theory. I agree with his conclusion that string theory is getting dangerously close to not being science anymore.

I enjoyed the f ...more

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