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Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law
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 to see whether they were wrong or not. In Peter Woit's view, superstring theory is just such an idea. In Not Even Wrong , he shows that what many physicists call superstring "theory" is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish. Not Even Wrong explains why the mathematical conditions for progress in physics are entirely absent from superstring theory today and shows that judgments about scientific statements, which should be based on the logical consistency of argument and experimental evidence, are instead based on the eminence of those claiming to know the truth. In the face of many books from enthusiasts for string theory, this book presents the other side of the story.
291 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2006
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December 27, 2014
[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 supersymmetric partner. No one has ever observed a supersymmetric partner to any known particle. The theory doesn't even predict what masses these partners should have, so it's not clear how to look for them. Very bad.
2. Incredibly bad predictions on vacuum energy/dark energy. It's notorious that natural versions of superstring theory predict a value for the density of dark energy that's at least 50 orders of magnitude too high - maybe as much as 100 orders of magnitude, or even more. As the author gleefully points out, probably the worst prediction ever made by a mainstream theory that people take seriously.
You'd think that this would be enough to sink it. But the worst part is that superstrings aren't in fact a proper, falsifiable theory. As Feynman is supposed to have said, superstring theorists don't make predictions, they make excuses. By which he meant that the framework is so loose, and has so many adjustable parameters, that any inconvenient observation can explained away. It's always possible to come up with a new variant that fits, or that at least can't easily be proved not to fit.
So, why on earth is this still the mainstream approach? Woit's argument is, more than anything, that it's down to one person, Edward Witten. Witten is incredibly gifted, and almost certainly the best mathematical physicist alive. By all accounts, he's also a very nice guy. Physicists are not just in awe of him, they like him too. When Witten started doing superstring theory, and discovered amazing new directions to explore, others followed. Unfortunately, the math required is very difficult, if you don't happen to be as smart as Witten. As Woit says, suppose you're a grad student who's spent several years of his life learning this stuff. It's hard to write it off as a bad investment. You have a strong emotional reason to want it to be right. After a while, a self-perpetuating circle is set up. Smolin spends rather more time analyzing the sociology in The Trouble with Physics.
So, is Woit's book just one long rant? 300-odd pages of variants on "The Emperor has no clothes"? Actually, no. The last third or so could reasonably be described in those terms. But the greater part of it is quite positive, and contains what I found to be a remarkably interesting take on quantum mechanics, presented so as to highlight the role played by the concept of symmetry. The way Woit tells it, one of most important people in the development of the field was the mathematician Hermann Weyl, who came up with some of the central ideas, and showed how mathematical ways of describing symmetries could be made into a cornerstone of the theory. There is an interesting human dimension to this as well. Weyl was not only Schrödinger's best friend and close collaborator; apparently Schrödinger was also quite happy for Weyl to be his wife's lover, while Schrödinger himself spent most of his time with another woman, who, oddly enough, has never been identified. I can't imagine why this hasn't all been made into a movie. Maybe it has, and I just don't know about it.
Woit presents a detailed account of how Weyl's ideas came to fruition in quantum chromodynamics and "The Standard Model", which he plausibly describes as one of the great achievements of science. He goes on to argue that the biggest mistake people have made has been to abandon Weyl's lead. Superstring theory no longer gives the same weight to these concepts. I'm in no way competent to judge whether Woit's arguments are correct, but they're interesting, and I hadn't heard them before.
Unfortunately, although Weyl's symmetry story is fascinating, and I applaud Woit's courage in delving so far into its details, I must warn you that he assumes a startling amount of background in math and physics. In particular, he talks more about the representation theory of Lie groups and its application to quantum mechanics than I would ever have imagined possible in what's supposed to be a non-technical book. I did courses on group theory and representation theory as an undergraduate, and I've read both Dirac on the principles of quantum mechanics and Kaplansky on Lie groups and Lie algebras. All of this stuff is very relevant to Woit's exposition, and he quotes it constantly. I still found myself struggling most of the time, and in general reading the book as poetry rather than as science. Alas, I'm not as smart as I'd like to think I am.
So, the more you know about that kind of thing, the more likely you are to feel that Woit is worth looking at. (Penrose is one famous physicist who gives this book a big thumbs-up). If you haven't got the math background, and just want to find out what the deal is with the crisis in superstring theory, I strongly recommend reading Smolin instead. They're very interesting books, and I'm glad I read both of them. But I wish more than ever that someone would sort out the mess that physics has got itself into. It's scary to see the world's greatest minds behaving like this.
PS Not drew my attention to the following xkcd cartoon. Well, if you can't be bothered to read the book, it's definitely giving you the essentials...
__________________________________________
[Update, December 2014]
I've just finished rereading this book; in the five years since I first read it, I've improved my understanding of physics, and now I found it fairly easy to get through. That said, there are still many passages I don't understand at anything more than a very superficial level. Woit has an impossible task to confront here. If he doesn't include a lot of extremely technical material, the string theorists he's attacking will sneer and say he doesn't know enough about the subject to be worth taking seriously. If he does put in that level of detail, he's going to lose most of his lay audience. I think I'm now at the level of expertise he's aiming for, but only just. I certainly wasn't first time round.
Woit's criticisms of string theory come across as serious and well-founded. He explains convincingly why the subject is failing to deliver on its promise of creating a valid "theory of everything"; as he says, string theory has all the classic hallmarks of a failed approach. There is no clean, elegant core idea, but a series of increasingly bizarre and incomprehensible ad hoc constructions. There are no empirical predictions. There is no metric of progress. There is no obvious technical problem that needs to be solved in order to eliminate the difficulties it is currently experiencing. The weaknesses appear deep-rooted and structural.
The thing I found most damning was the reception Woit's manuscript received from the Cambridge University Press referees. Some of them were enthusiastic, but the string theorists were implacably hostile. Quite understandably so, of course, given that he was attacking their subject, but they were unable to offer coherent criticisms; they claimed he didn't know what he was talking about, but presented no details. The only concrete item Woit received was a comment on a single sentence, which had been misquoted so as to convey a meaning different from its original one. If the book really were the product of a crank with an axe to grind, they should have had no trouble demolishing it; all they could do was bluster, but their opinion carried enough weight that they managed to block publication until Woit found another, less prestigious publisher.
Shame on you, Cambridge University Press. You published one of my books, and it wasn't nearly as interesting or worthwhile as this one. In Woit's case, you didn't have the guts to offend influential people in the theoretical physics community, and you let yourselves be bullied into silence. I expected better of you.
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 supersymmetric partner. No one has ever observed a supersymmetric partner to any known particle. The theory doesn't even predict what masses these partners should have, so it's not clear how to look for them. Very bad.
2. Incredibly bad predictions on vacuum energy/dark energy. It's notorious that natural versions of superstring theory predict a value for the density of dark energy that's at least 50 orders of magnitude too high - maybe as much as 100 orders of magnitude, or even more. As the author gleefully points out, probably the worst prediction ever made by a mainstream theory that people take seriously.
You'd think that this would be enough to sink it. But the worst part is that superstrings aren't in fact a proper, falsifiable theory. As Feynman is supposed to have said, superstring theorists don't make predictions, they make excuses. By which he meant that the framework is so loose, and has so many adjustable parameters, that any inconvenient observation can explained away. It's always possible to come up with a new variant that fits, or that at least can't easily be proved not to fit.
So, why on earth is this still the mainstream approach? Woit's argument is, more than anything, that it's down to one person, Edward Witten. Witten is incredibly gifted, and almost certainly the best mathematical physicist alive. By all accounts, he's also a very nice guy. Physicists are not just in awe of him, they like him too. When Witten started doing superstring theory, and discovered amazing new directions to explore, others followed. Unfortunately, the math required is very difficult, if you don't happen to be as smart as Witten. As Woit says, suppose you're a grad student who's spent several years of his life learning this stuff. It's hard to write it off as a bad investment. You have a strong emotional reason to want it to be right. After a while, a self-perpetuating circle is set up. Smolin spends rather more time analyzing the sociology in The Trouble with Physics.
So, is Woit's book just one long rant? 300-odd pages of variants on "The Emperor has no clothes"? Actually, no. The last third or so could reasonably be described in those terms. But the greater part of it is quite positive, and contains what I found to be a remarkably interesting take on quantum mechanics, presented so as to highlight the role played by the concept of symmetry. The way Woit tells it, one of most important people in the development of the field was the mathematician Hermann Weyl, who came up with some of the central ideas, and showed how mathematical ways of describing symmetries could be made into a cornerstone of the theory. There is an interesting human dimension to this as well. Weyl was not only Schrödinger's best friend and close collaborator; apparently Schrödinger was also quite happy for Weyl to be his wife's lover, while Schrödinger himself spent most of his time with another woman, who, oddly enough, has never been identified. I can't imagine why this hasn't all been made into a movie. Maybe it has, and I just don't know about it.
Woit presents a detailed account of how Weyl's ideas came to fruition in quantum chromodynamics and "The Standard Model", which he plausibly describes as one of the great achievements of science. He goes on to argue that the biggest mistake people have made has been to abandon Weyl's lead. Superstring theory no longer gives the same weight to these concepts. I'm in no way competent to judge whether Woit's arguments are correct, but they're interesting, and I hadn't heard them before.
Unfortunately, although Weyl's symmetry story is fascinating, and I applaud Woit's courage in delving so far into its details, I must warn you that he assumes a startling amount of background in math and physics. In particular, he talks more about the representation theory of Lie groups and its application to quantum mechanics than I would ever have imagined possible in what's supposed to be a non-technical book. I did courses on group theory and representation theory as an undergraduate, and I've read both Dirac on the principles of quantum mechanics and Kaplansky on Lie groups and Lie algebras. All of this stuff is very relevant to Woit's exposition, and he quotes it constantly. I still found myself struggling most of the time, and in general reading the book as poetry rather than as science. Alas, I'm not as smart as I'd like to think I am.
So, the more you know about that kind of thing, the more likely you are to feel that Woit is worth looking at. (Penrose is one famous physicist who gives this book a big thumbs-up). If you haven't got the math background, and just want to find out what the deal is with the crisis in superstring theory, I strongly recommend reading Smolin instead. They're very interesting books, and I'm glad I read both of them. But I wish more than ever that someone would sort out the mess that physics has got itself into. It's scary to see the world's greatest minds behaving like this.
PS Not drew my attention to the following xkcd cartoon. Well, if you can't be bothered to read the book, it's definitely giving you the essentials...
__________________________________________
[Update, December 2014]
I've just finished rereading this book; in the five years since I first read it, I've improved my understanding of physics, and now I found it fairly easy to get through. That said, there are still many passages I don't understand at anything more than a very superficial level. Woit has an impossible task to confront here. If he doesn't include a lot of extremely technical material, the string theorists he's attacking will sneer and say he doesn't know enough about the subject to be worth taking seriously. If he does put in that level of detail, he's going to lose most of his lay audience. I think I'm now at the level of expertise he's aiming for, but only just. I certainly wasn't first time round.
Woit's criticisms of string theory come across as serious and well-founded. He explains convincingly why the subject is failing to deliver on its promise of creating a valid "theory of everything"; as he says, string theory has all the classic hallmarks of a failed approach. There is no clean, elegant core idea, but a series of increasingly bizarre and incomprehensible ad hoc constructions. There are no empirical predictions. There is no metric of progress. There is no obvious technical problem that needs to be solved in order to eliminate the difficulties it is currently experiencing. The weaknesses appear deep-rooted and structural.
The thing I found most damning was the reception Woit's manuscript received from the Cambridge University Press referees. Some of them were enthusiastic, but the string theorists were implacably hostile. Quite understandably so, of course, given that he was attacking their subject, but they were unable to offer coherent criticisms; they claimed he didn't know what he was talking about, but presented no details. The only concrete item Woit received was a comment on a single sentence, which had been misquoted so as to convey a meaning different from its original one. If the book really were the product of a crank with an axe to grind, they should have had no trouble demolishing it; all they could do was bluster, but their opinion carried enough weight that they managed to block publication until Woit found another, less prestigious publisher.
Shame on you, Cambridge University Press. You published one of my books, and it wasn't nearly as interesting or worthwhile as this one. In Woit's case, you didn't have the guts to offend influential people in the theoretical physics community, and you let yourselves be bullied into silence. I expected better of you.
Read
August 27, 2018This 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.
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.
December 17, 2008
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.
“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.
June 6, 2014
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.
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.
March 27, 2021
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.
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.
December 13, 2014
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 yourself are a particle physicist), the history of how string theory came to be so widely accepted despite the lack of evidence for it is absolutely fascinating.
July 28, 2012
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 "not invalid." So how do you test a theory that invents a world full of infinitesimally small strings vibrating in 11-dimensions? Maybe it will be that string theorists find a way to unify the four force fields in a mathematically satisfying way within their framework - and maybe I will devise a brilliant theory that methed-out garden gnomes are behind the slow disappearance of my sock pairs. Until I see a garden gnome dragging a bag of stolen Walgreen's ephedrine down the street, that theory is of limited utility. All it does is describe a plausible reality, not necessarily the one I live in. But it is a beautiful theory. Shit, I even used 100 years of painstakingly developed group theory to classify the gnome types. How could I be wrong!? Worse yet, can I ever know I'm wrong? That's the important question this book raises about string theory, currently the most popular (and fawned over) fad in theoretical physics.
April 2, 2019
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 placeholder for the concepts discusses, the statements soon lose ability to convince, and you have to take his words for it.
Nevertheless, the broader picture and general criticism are still clear. Exploration in string theory (which is not even a single theory, but a collection of related math models that once held the hope of uniting relativity and quantum mechanism) has not delivered anything that can be experimentally verified nor the type of rigorously precise thought mathematicians produce. In fact, some recent papers from a pair of string theorists were initially thought to be hoax of incoherent rambling. Yet, they are accepted by reputable journal with long and specific comments from reviewers for editing.
The book sounds like a good piece for physics students to read before they intend to choose string theory as a field of endeavor.
Nevertheless, the broader picture and general criticism are still clear. Exploration in string theory (which is not even a single theory, but a collection of related math models that once held the hope of uniting relativity and quantum mechanism) has not delivered anything that can be experimentally verified nor the type of rigorously precise thought mathematicians produce. In fact, some recent papers from a pair of string theorists were initially thought to be hoax of incoherent rambling. Yet, they are accepted by reputable journal with long and specific comments from reviewers for editing.
The book sounds like a good piece for physics students to read before they intend to choose string theory as a field of endeavor.
December 28, 2010
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?
April 14, 2014
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.
March 12, 2021
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 qualify as science because its assumptions and conclusions are neither testable nor falsifiable. A proper scientific theory rests on testable assumptions, and we judge it by its predictive power. In this book, Peter Woit argues his case against String Theory and shows why he thinks this way. He wrote the book in 2003-04, but the core of his arguments is still valid in 2021.
I shall recap here the terrain of String Theory before we get to Woit’s critique. String theory is not yet a finished product, though it came to prominence fifty years ago. The technical name for String theory today is M-theory, perhaps meaning the mother of all string theories. We have five consistent versions of string theory (and supergravity) at present. M-theory unifies them under a single mathematical structure. Depending on the physical regime, M-theory resembles each of the five theories. There is no empirical evidence for any of them or for their competitor theories like Loop Quantum Gravity or the E8 theory. But physicists favor M-theory because of its mathematical consistency.
The key features and conclusions of the different string theories state:
All objects in the universe comprise vibrating filaments called strings and membranes of energy.
We exist in a universe with extra, curled-up spatial dimensions, perhaps ten excluding time. These extra dimensions ‘fold’ on themselves in a myriad number of shapes, resulting in a vast set of solutions.
Each fundamental particle has a related particle called a super-partner. We call this supersymmetry.
There are parallel universes, up to 10^500 of them.
Our universe could just be a simulation. Or a hologram, projected from data on a distant two-dimensional surface.
Since humanity exists, scientists can use it as an explanation for certain physical properties of our universe. This is the anthropic principle.
The practitioners of String theory accept that the most promising positive experimental results would most likely not be able to prove string theory right beyond doubt. Negative results would most likely not be able to prove it wrong either. But they argue it must be right because it has mathematical elegance and beauty. Paul Dirac’s statement that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment comes handy for them. Physicists find beauty and elegance when theories have compact expressions in mathematics. Woit says Einstein bears a lot of the responsibility for this perspective in fundamental physics. When he discovered General Relativity employing this strategy, he became more mystical. He started believing that mathematical beauty alone, rather than experimentation, could point scientists on the right path.
Woit is more than a critic of just String Theory. He believes many branches of Physics are in crisis now. Particle physics, on the theoretical front, suffers from the long-standing crisis in string theory, in its failure to explain or predict any large distance physics. It is incapable of determining the dimension, geometry, and particle spectrum of macroscopic spacetime. On the experimental front, high-energy particle physics faces fundamental technological obstacles.
The Large Hadron Collider confirmed the Standard Model’s vision for how particles get their masses. It did not offer any concrete hint of any new particles besides the Higgs. It could not produce any evidence of the additional dimensions because they are 10 million billion times smaller than what the Large Hadron Collider can resolve. Hence they are unobservable. The next-generation accelerator, called FCC, that can explore higher energies than the LHC is far off in the future and very expensive at 21 billion Euros. Many physicists feel the energy regime the FCC might reach may be insufficient for new discoveries.
On Multiverse theories, Woit says that the problem is not that they are not testable through direct means. The problem is there is no indirect evidence for Multiverse. Or a plausible way of getting any. The anthropic principle makes an enormous number of assumptions regarding multiple universes, a random creation process, and probability distributions that determine the likelihood of various features. None of these is testable because they entail hypothetical regions of spacetime that are forever beyond the reach of observation. And there are seldom any predictions. Hence, he believes it is time to abandon such failed theoretical ideas.
Peter Woit says superstring theory is a complicated idea. To understand it, we should first study and understand quantum field theory. This is a demanding task by itself. This presents students and researchers with a huge barrier of entry to the subject. By the time they achieve some concrete expertise, they often have invested a huge part of their careers in studying superstrings. Such investment is difficult to renounce in a psychological and professional sense. This difficulty makes it hard for researchers to leave the field, even if they are skeptical about it. Woit speculates that the level of complexity and difficulty of superstring theory is perhaps a sign that it is on the wrong track. It reflects the fact that no one has any idea whether there is some unknown simple fundamental M-theory.
A second problem is even more serious. Because of its complexity, many scientists, referees, and students do not understand all the mathematics or physics in the papers they referee or peer review. So, instead of relying on their understanding of the subject, they depend on what others say about it. This results in papers being published in reputed journals, even though they are of dubious quality or just plain nonsense. Woit recalls three examples to illustrate this.
In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal crafted a hoax, writing a well-constructed and meaningless article. Its title was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The article contained no rational argument. Instead, it strung together unsupported claims, breathtaking leaps of logic, and an extensive collection of the sillier parts of the writings of both postmodern theorists and some scientists. Sokal submitted the article to the well-known and rather prestigious academic journal ‘Social Text’, whose editors accepted it for publication in an issue on “Science Studies.”
In October 2002, two French scientists and brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, published five articles on quantum gravity, three of which were almost identical, in peer-reviewed journals. Five sets of editors and referees had gone over these papers and accepted them for publication, without noticing that they were egregious nonsense. The papers were about the roots of space and time using topological quantum field theory. The Bogdanov brothers claimed all this related to quantum field theory at high temperatures. Woit says one can publish complete gibberish on quantum gravity with little effort in many journals, some of them rather prominent. He believes one reason is that many physicists are not willing to admit that they don’t understand many aspects of the theory.
A third instance concerns a Harvard scientist, John Hagelin. By 1995, Hagelin had written 73 scientific articles, most of them published in very prestigious particle theory journals, many of them cited by more than a hundred later articles. Among them were a couple of titles, “Is Consciousness the Unified Field?” and “Restructuring Physics from Its Foundations in Light of Maharishi’s Vedic Science”. Woit says virtually every theoretical physicist in the world rejects this as nonsense. But Hagelin has a Ph.D. from the Harvard Physics Department and many cited papers published in the best peer-reviewed journals in theoretical physics.
Considering all this, one would wonder ‘how come string theory still goes strong in academia’? Peter Woit explains its prominence in the US as follows. He says the particle theory community in the United States is not a large one, comprising about a thousand people. It is a talented group. But it has been working for two decades in an environment of intellectual failure and fierce competition for scarce resources. This is one reason it is the only game in town. The social and financial structures within which people are working are also an important part of this situation.
The author admits that the discussion in this book is adversarial, criticizing the superstring theory program as a failed and over-hyped project. Still, I found it thought-provoking, though difficult to understand. About seventy percent of the book describes research leading to the standard model and then to string theory. The remaining portion contains his stinging critique of superstring theories. I found it hard to keep up with a lot of the material because it switches between high levels of technical writing and popular science writing. I had read Lee Smolin’s book on the same subject several years ago. It helped me understand the overall thrust of this book. I think the reader would need a knowledge of college-level physics to understand the book.
People who have reservations on String Theory or how we practice science nowadays will find the book interesting.
I shall recap here the terrain of String Theory before we get to Woit’s critique. String theory is not yet a finished product, though it came to prominence fifty years ago. The technical name for String theory today is M-theory, perhaps meaning the mother of all string theories. We have five consistent versions of string theory (and supergravity) at present. M-theory unifies them under a single mathematical structure. Depending on the physical regime, M-theory resembles each of the five theories. There is no empirical evidence for any of them or for their competitor theories like Loop Quantum Gravity or the E8 theory. But physicists favor M-theory because of its mathematical consistency.
The key features and conclusions of the different string theories state:
All objects in the universe comprise vibrating filaments called strings and membranes of energy.
We exist in a universe with extra, curled-up spatial dimensions, perhaps ten excluding time. These extra dimensions ‘fold’ on themselves in a myriad number of shapes, resulting in a vast set of solutions.
Each fundamental particle has a related particle called a super-partner. We call this supersymmetry.
There are parallel universes, up to 10^500 of them.
Our universe could just be a simulation. Or a hologram, projected from data on a distant two-dimensional surface.
Since humanity exists, scientists can use it as an explanation for certain physical properties of our universe. This is the anthropic principle.
The practitioners of String theory accept that the most promising positive experimental results would most likely not be able to prove string theory right beyond doubt. Negative results would most likely not be able to prove it wrong either. But they argue it must be right because it has mathematical elegance and beauty. Paul Dirac’s statement that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment comes handy for them. Physicists find beauty and elegance when theories have compact expressions in mathematics. Woit says Einstein bears a lot of the responsibility for this perspective in fundamental physics. When he discovered General Relativity employing this strategy, he became more mystical. He started believing that mathematical beauty alone, rather than experimentation, could point scientists on the right path.
Woit is more than a critic of just String Theory. He believes many branches of Physics are in crisis now. Particle physics, on the theoretical front, suffers from the long-standing crisis in string theory, in its failure to explain or predict any large distance physics. It is incapable of determining the dimension, geometry, and particle spectrum of macroscopic spacetime. On the experimental front, high-energy particle physics faces fundamental technological obstacles.
The Large Hadron Collider confirmed the Standard Model’s vision for how particles get their masses. It did not offer any concrete hint of any new particles besides the Higgs. It could not produce any evidence of the additional dimensions because they are 10 million billion times smaller than what the Large Hadron Collider can resolve. Hence they are unobservable. The next-generation accelerator, called FCC, that can explore higher energies than the LHC is far off in the future and very expensive at 21 billion Euros. Many physicists feel the energy regime the FCC might reach may be insufficient for new discoveries.
On Multiverse theories, Woit says that the problem is not that they are not testable through direct means. The problem is there is no indirect evidence for Multiverse. Or a plausible way of getting any. The anthropic principle makes an enormous number of assumptions regarding multiple universes, a random creation process, and probability distributions that determine the likelihood of various features. None of these is testable because they entail hypothetical regions of spacetime that are forever beyond the reach of observation. And there are seldom any predictions. Hence, he believes it is time to abandon such failed theoretical ideas.
Peter Woit says superstring theory is a complicated idea. To understand it, we should first study and understand quantum field theory. This is a demanding task by itself. This presents students and researchers with a huge barrier of entry to the subject. By the time they achieve some concrete expertise, they often have invested a huge part of their careers in studying superstrings. Such investment is difficult to renounce in a psychological and professional sense. This difficulty makes it hard for researchers to leave the field, even if they are skeptical about it. Woit speculates that the level of complexity and difficulty of superstring theory is perhaps a sign that it is on the wrong track. It reflects the fact that no one has any idea whether there is some unknown simple fundamental M-theory.
A second problem is even more serious. Because of its complexity, many scientists, referees, and students do not understand all the mathematics or physics in the papers they referee or peer review. So, instead of relying on their understanding of the subject, they depend on what others say about it. This results in papers being published in reputed journals, even though they are of dubious quality or just plain nonsense. Woit recalls three examples to illustrate this.
In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal crafted a hoax, writing a well-constructed and meaningless article. Its title was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The article contained no rational argument. Instead, it strung together unsupported claims, breathtaking leaps of logic, and an extensive collection of the sillier parts of the writings of both postmodern theorists and some scientists. Sokal submitted the article to the well-known and rather prestigious academic journal ‘Social Text’, whose editors accepted it for publication in an issue on “Science Studies.”
In October 2002, two French scientists and brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, published five articles on quantum gravity, three of which were almost identical, in peer-reviewed journals. Five sets of editors and referees had gone over these papers and accepted them for publication, without noticing that they were egregious nonsense. The papers were about the roots of space and time using topological quantum field theory. The Bogdanov brothers claimed all this related to quantum field theory at high temperatures. Woit says one can publish complete gibberish on quantum gravity with little effort in many journals, some of them rather prominent. He believes one reason is that many physicists are not willing to admit that they don’t understand many aspects of the theory.
A third instance concerns a Harvard scientist, John Hagelin. By 1995, Hagelin had written 73 scientific articles, most of them published in very prestigious particle theory journals, many of them cited by more than a hundred later articles. Among them were a couple of titles, “Is Consciousness the Unified Field?” and “Restructuring Physics from Its Foundations in Light of Maharishi’s Vedic Science”. Woit says virtually every theoretical physicist in the world rejects this as nonsense. But Hagelin has a Ph.D. from the Harvard Physics Department and many cited papers published in the best peer-reviewed journals in theoretical physics.
Considering all this, one would wonder ‘how come string theory still goes strong in academia’? Peter Woit explains its prominence in the US as follows. He says the particle theory community in the United States is not a large one, comprising about a thousand people. It is a talented group. But it has been working for two decades in an environment of intellectual failure and fierce competition for scarce resources. This is one reason it is the only game in town. The social and financial structures within which people are working are also an important part of this situation.
The author admits that the discussion in this book is adversarial, criticizing the superstring theory program as a failed and over-hyped project. Still, I found it thought-provoking, though difficult to understand. About seventy percent of the book describes research leading to the standard model and then to string theory. The remaining portion contains his stinging critique of superstring theories. I found it hard to keep up with a lot of the material because it switches between high levels of technical writing and popular science writing. I had read Lee Smolin’s book on the same subject several years ago. It helped me understand the overall thrust of this book. I think the reader would need a knowledge of college-level physics to understand the book.
People who have reservations on String Theory or how we practice science nowadays will find the book interesting.
December 30, 2011
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, not as good as Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics, which addresses the same topic in a much more cohesive and approachable way. I recommend starting with that book, and moving on to Not Even Wrong if you want to see more of the nitty-gritty details.
Addendum: the Not Even Wrong blog is absolutely great. Worth subscribing even if you don't read the book.
Overall, not as good as Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics, which addresses the same topic in a much more cohesive and approachable way. I recommend starting with that book, and moving on to Not Even Wrong if you want to see more of the nitty-gritty details.
Addendum: the Not Even Wrong blog is absolutely great. Worth subscribing even if you don't read the book.
Read
April 4, 2022This 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.
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.
March 11, 2024
This is an older book (written 20 years ago) Bur remains an often mentions source of critique of science in general and string theory specifically. The author makes some assertion with which I disagree but in general is thinking critically about his own profession and the lack of applicability a theory has if (as Feynman says, it doesn't match the observations). The author only cursively mentioned the problem that a model of Everything (infinitely tweakable) is a model of nothing... yes, a cubic spline equation is useful but it's generally useful and You have to Know how to parameterize it... we do with cubic spline; they Still don't (maybe never will) with String Theory.
As the Decades (Centuries) fly by, will there be No progress in models of the basic physical construction of matter? I'll be reading more about the physics of the Universe and particles of matter and energy which construct it. You should read this book (as a warning) and others too!
As the Decades (Centuries) fly by, will there be No progress in models of the basic physical construction of matter? I'll be reading more about the physics of the Universe and particles of matter and energy which construct it. You should read this book (as a warning) and others too!
December 26, 2015
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.
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.
Read
February 6, 2016"…[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.)
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.)
February 11, 2016
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 Woit, totally in awe of the theory's mathematical elegance. Hundreds of peer-reviewed papers have been published on the myriad complexities of the theory's basic assertions (obviously a tenure-earning, grant-funding boon for many theoretical physicists). But, as Woit maintains, if you can't test it, what good is it?
My initial hope of gaining some understanding of string theory was probably naive. Woit does attempt to translate some aspects of the theory into English without introducing any of the complex mathematical base of the theory. I'll trust his word that the mathematics describing string theory is incomprehensible to the public; unfortunately I found Woit's English translation mostly fruitless. His failure is not from lack of trying, or lack of expertise: Woit has a theoretical physics PhD from Princeton and teaches mathematics at Columbia. Perhaps his attempt was damned from the beginning by the nature of the beast: complex mathematical formulations rarely translate into written language. The best string theory description is still Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.
My initial hope of gaining some understanding of string theory was probably naive. Woit does attempt to translate some aspects of the theory into English without introducing any of the complex mathematical base of the theory. I'll trust his word that the mathematics describing string theory is incomprehensible to the public; unfortunately I found Woit's English translation mostly fruitless. His failure is not from lack of trying, or lack of expertise: Woit has a theoretical physics PhD from Princeton and teaches mathematics at Columbia. Perhaps his attempt was damned from the beginning by the nature of the beast: complex mathematical formulations rarely translate into written language. The best string theory description is still Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.
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November 25, 2022Comment:
Our author argues that string theory is little more than a mathematically induced hallucination. Without experimental verification it amounts to a new type of aesthetics, ...or (I fear) theology.
This is where, I would argue, the 'scientistic' notions of gradualism and uniformitarianism have led us. These two unproven (and, I believe, unprovable) notions have convinced modern scientists that the Unknown can somehow be wiped away, as if it were a stain, with a mathematical sponge.
But how do scientists believe in something that is not experimentally verified? ...Faith. God help us - Faith!
The theologians of the next universal religion are being schooled by physicists today!
Again, string theory now frankly involves speculation that is, almost by definition, untestable. Physics is therefore on its way to a cosmological/mythological/theological (cum mathematical) understanding of Reality. It is funny that no one realizes it. So long as there is the 'Unknown' there will be Religion. Various religions come and go; but Religion (very, very broadly conceived) always remains...
Like the ancient Ptolemaic System, string theory is a mathematical induced hallucination, and like the ancient geocentric model, it will eventually be overturned, by new observations.
Besides this book have a look at "The Trouble with Physics" by Lee Smolin.
Our author argues that string theory is little more than a mathematically induced hallucination. Without experimental verification it amounts to a new type of aesthetics, ...or (I fear) theology.
This is where, I would argue, the 'scientistic' notions of gradualism and uniformitarianism have led us. These two unproven (and, I believe, unprovable) notions have convinced modern scientists that the Unknown can somehow be wiped away, as if it were a stain, with a mathematical sponge.
But how do scientists believe in something that is not experimentally verified? ...Faith. God help us - Faith!
The theologians of the next universal religion are being schooled by physicists today!
Again, string theory now frankly involves speculation that is, almost by definition, untestable. Physics is therefore on its way to a cosmological/mythological/theological (cum mathematical) understanding of Reality. It is funny that no one realizes it. So long as there is the 'Unknown' there will be Religion. Various religions come and go; but Religion (very, very broadly conceived) always remains...
Like the ancient Ptolemaic System, string theory is a mathematical induced hallucination, and like the ancient geocentric model, it will eventually be overturned, by new observations.
Besides this book have a look at "The Trouble with Physics" by Lee Smolin.
May 17, 2009
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).
April 2, 2023
To mention a few limitations of this book firstly:
1) It is very tentative in its criticisms of the growing myriad of errors in a lot of what passes for physics in the likes of the string theory community. He constantly goes on and on about how string theory has led to great collaboration between physics and mathematics, forgetting to emphasise that part of the reason for this and consequence of this is that string theory is just mathematics at this stage, not really physics at all and that is why is getting on so well with mathematics. He does bring this point up at the end. But as I say, compared to the amount of times he emphasises the positive aspect of this it does make you feel he is trying to still defer to the authority of this string theory dogma.
2) He doesn't question any aspect of mainstream physics except for string theory and specifically its use of the anthropic principle. In his mind everything was good until then, the whole standard model, the dubious inflationary big bang, difficulties reconciling general relativity and quantum theory, dark energy, dark matter. This whole plethora of stuff in his mind seems to be just fine. The problem he has is that string theory is only a natural and logical extension of the standard model approach, along with the dark energy, dark matter, and inflation. I think it is unlikely that the problem is going to be something simply appearing late at this stage like the anthropic principle, the problem goes much deeper. The problem goes back all the way to how we interpret relativity to my mind. And this is the view of the likes of Barbour and Smolin also. By imagining a real dimensional container, or a background dependent approach, like string theory does, it, and neither QED nor the standard model, do not take on board the true lesson of Einsteins relativity of a need for a total background independent approach to the problem. This means a pure relationalism and no pre-given dimensional container to work with.
3) A lot of emphasis is given on particle colliders and experimental approaches as if this is going to solve the problems and not enough attention to the deep theoretical muddle and tangle that is the heart of the problem with string theory. This is both a somewhat strength as well as a weakness in this book. Because it does make for some important considerations that we often tend to take for granted, which is that it is often physical and technological quirks of our situation that limit our understanding of certain things.
Those limitations aside, this book provides a good overview of a lot of the central physics ideas and some of their limitations at explaining things within and around implications of the standard model, as it has developed through the mathematical ideas of Weyl, and the insights of other key figures such as Feynman and Witten. He also shows the disagreement aspect with quotes of numerous top theoretical physicists voicing their concerns about the current direction of string theory, and gives an insight into the culture of string theory and how it can lead to the pursuit of sometimes meaningless ideas and that even nonsense articles can sometimes pass peer review just by using a few high sounding concepts from the field and jumbling them together in some manner, because the ideas have gotten so niche and complex that few have the time to properly appreciate the work being done by others.
1) It is very tentative in its criticisms of the growing myriad of errors in a lot of what passes for physics in the likes of the string theory community. He constantly goes on and on about how string theory has led to great collaboration between physics and mathematics, forgetting to emphasise that part of the reason for this and consequence of this is that string theory is just mathematics at this stage, not really physics at all and that is why is getting on so well with mathematics. He does bring this point up at the end. But as I say, compared to the amount of times he emphasises the positive aspect of this it does make you feel he is trying to still defer to the authority of this string theory dogma.
2) He doesn't question any aspect of mainstream physics except for string theory and specifically its use of the anthropic principle. In his mind everything was good until then, the whole standard model, the dubious inflationary big bang, difficulties reconciling general relativity and quantum theory, dark energy, dark matter. This whole plethora of stuff in his mind seems to be just fine. The problem he has is that string theory is only a natural and logical extension of the standard model approach, along with the dark energy, dark matter, and inflation. I think it is unlikely that the problem is going to be something simply appearing late at this stage like the anthropic principle, the problem goes much deeper. The problem goes back all the way to how we interpret relativity to my mind. And this is the view of the likes of Barbour and Smolin also. By imagining a real dimensional container, or a background dependent approach, like string theory does, it, and neither QED nor the standard model, do not take on board the true lesson of Einsteins relativity of a need for a total background independent approach to the problem. This means a pure relationalism and no pre-given dimensional container to work with.
3) A lot of emphasis is given on particle colliders and experimental approaches as if this is going to solve the problems and not enough attention to the deep theoretical muddle and tangle that is the heart of the problem with string theory. This is both a somewhat strength as well as a weakness in this book. Because it does make for some important considerations that we often tend to take for granted, which is that it is often physical and technological quirks of our situation that limit our understanding of certain things.
Those limitations aside, this book provides a good overview of a lot of the central physics ideas and some of their limitations at explaining things within and around implications of the standard model, as it has developed through the mathematical ideas of Weyl, and the insights of other key figures such as Feynman and Witten. He also shows the disagreement aspect with quotes of numerous top theoretical physicists voicing their concerns about the current direction of string theory, and gives an insight into the culture of string theory and how it can lead to the pursuit of sometimes meaningless ideas and that even nonsense articles can sometimes pass peer review just by using a few high sounding concepts from the field and jumbling them together in some manner, because the ideas have gotten so niche and complex that few have the time to properly appreciate the work being done by others.
August 25, 2018
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.
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.
December 8, 2019
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.
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.
January 29, 2018
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/replace the standard model. This section is humbling for anyone who things physics will be trivially extended. The flip side is that the book does a commendable job indicating just how powerful, rigorous, and consistent the standard model is.
Supersymmetry is shown to either require massive particles orders of magnitude beyond what we can detect or phenomena we should have observed by now but haven't. Following is by far the most rigorous takedown of string theory I've encountered. The author dissects the failures of both 10 and 11 dimensional as well as 24 dimensional models as well as the culture that has generated neither useful experiments nor actual progress. The author quickly calls out those seduced by mathematical beauty and points out places in the past where such pursuits have simply failed compared to the very small number of times (discovery of the positron) where such pursuit presaged a new discovery. String theory as currently understood fails coherency (the set of predictions are not internally consistent), powerful (they don't predict new testable phenomena), nor rigorous (they depend often on a procedurally generated space of parameters leading to a hundred free parameters).
The next best section of this book are the chapter end notes where the author lists texts that the curious can use to further investigate a topic. Rare is the book that on reading compels me to buy six more, this is the rare one that does.
Supersymmetry is shown to either require massive particles orders of magnitude beyond what we can detect or phenomena we should have observed by now but haven't. Following is by far the most rigorous takedown of string theory I've encountered. The author dissects the failures of both 10 and 11 dimensional as well as 24 dimensional models as well as the culture that has generated neither useful experiments nor actual progress. The author quickly calls out those seduced by mathematical beauty and points out places in the past where such pursuits have simply failed compared to the very small number of times (discovery of the positron) where such pursuit presaged a new discovery. String theory as currently understood fails coherency (the set of predictions are not internally consistent), powerful (they don't predict new testable phenomena), nor rigorous (they depend often on a procedurally generated space of parameters leading to a hundred free parameters).
The next best section of this book are the chapter end notes where the author lists texts that the curious can use to further investigate a topic. Rare is the book that on reading compels me to buy six more, this is the rare one that does.
September 3, 2019
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”
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”
January 6, 2021
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 as simple explanations of important physics ideas like Quantum field Theory. The 2nd half is written more like his blog posts where he complains a lot about string theory and doesn't seem to have as much research on topics as the first half. Which is fine but comes off as more rant-y and repetitive.
While this seems to be marketed is a popular book. There are a lot of very technical explanations of Mathematics and physics that require at least graduate students or post docs in math or physics to even understand. There are also a lot of references to mathematician and physicists that you won't get or appreciate if you never heard of them before or aren't already familiar. I would probably past on the book if you're a complete lay person and recommend having an undergrad level knowledge before pursuing this book in its fullest.
The first half of the book has a lot of introductory ideas like history, how experimental particle colliders works, as well as simple explanations of important physics ideas like Quantum field Theory. The 2nd half is written more like his blog posts where he complains a lot about string theory and doesn't seem to have as much research on topics as the first half. Which is fine but comes off as more rant-y and repetitive.
While this seems to be marketed is a popular book. There are a lot of very technical explanations of Mathematics and physics that require at least graduate students or post docs in math or physics to even understand. There are also a lot of references to mathematician and physicists that you won't get or appreciate if you never heard of them before or aren't already familiar. I would probably past on the book if you're a complete lay person and recommend having an undergrad level knowledge before pursuing this book in its fullest.
April 8, 2021
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 more of both, mostly because it didn’t do a great job of explaining either. It is a long critique of string theory, and it has some great parts. The history of quantum mechanics is excellent, and his critique, which gets into the nature of science, is convincing, if a bit personal. It makes me want to go throw out my copy of “Elegant Universe”. Where it fails is that it sells itself as a book about the topic for lay people, but it most certainly isn’t. Lots of impenetrable bits about group theory and complex geometry, that I only caught about maybe 50% of (usually much less), makes me want to go learn more, but I wish it were presented better here.
August 4, 2022
I was hoping that this book would improve my understanding of String Theory, but it didn't. There was much reference to many highly technical topics, but more from a historical point of view. If you didn't understand these topics already, you wouldn't after reading the book. The author even acknowledges this point when he explains that there would be no equations:
"The more technical chapters have been written without the use of equations, and an attempt has been made as much as possible both to avoid technical vocabulary and to offer at least some sort of explanation of vocabulary that can’t be avoided."
There were also very few diagrams. So who is the intended reader? My guess is that this book was intended to be a cautionary tale for the next generation of physics students. The message is clear: "Don't throw away your career on String Theory!" So unless you are planning your physics career, this book will likely disappoint you. Too bad because Peter Woit is obviously very knowledgeable and I believe he could have made a valuable contribution to the public understanding of String Theory.
"The more technical chapters have been written without the use of equations, and an attempt has been made as much as possible both to avoid technical vocabulary and to offer at least some sort of explanation of vocabulary that can’t be avoided."
There were also very few diagrams. So who is the intended reader? My guess is that this book was intended to be a cautionary tale for the next generation of physics students. The message is clear: "Don't throw away your career on String Theory!" So unless you are planning your physics career, this book will likely disappoint you. Too bad because Peter Woit is obviously very knowledgeable and I believe he could have made a valuable contribution to the public understanding of String Theory.
February 19, 2024
Peter Woit challenges the validity and usefulness of string theory, a popular framework that attempts to unify all the forces and particles of nature. He argues that string theory is not a scientific theory, but rather a mathematical speculation that has no connection to empirical reality. He criticizes the lack of testability, falsifiability, and predictive power of string theory, as well as the sociological and philosophical factors that have influenced its development and acceptance. He also questions the anthropic principle, the idea that the observed properties of the universe are compatible with the existence of intelligent life because otherwise we would not be able to observe them, which he considers to be misguided and unscientific. He advocates for a return to the rigorous standards of empirical evidence and logical consistency that have guided the progress of physics in the past. Like Peter, I'm concerned that the pursuit of string theory and other untestable hypotheses leads physics astray and undermines the credibility and relevance of scientific endeavours.
April 15, 2021
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 theory--especially the chapters on the culture and incentives in the discipline of theoretical particle physics--are very good! Engaging, accessible, thought-provoking.
I'll average it out to three stars. If you only want to read the good parts, you could probably skip ahead all the way to chapter 13, and you'd be fine.
The parts of the book that are about the problems with string theory--especially the chapters on the culture and incentives in the discipline of theoretical particle physics--are very good! Engaging, accessible, thought-provoking.
I'll average it out to three stars. If you only want to read the good parts, you could probably skip ahead all the way to chapter 13, and you'd be fine.
January 15, 2023
I’ve read a lot of popular physics books. This one stands out for 2 reasons:
1) It holds no punches in a refreshing and brutally honest assessment of the modern state of physics. Woit holds physics to a justifiably high standard of truth, and that is an edge I feel a lot of other popular physics books lack. We are reading about science after all.
2) It doesn’t hold back on technical details. This may bother some, but as someone who studied physics 20 years ago I crave more depth than what most popular accounts will offer and Woit serves it up. Plenty of it. I feel like I am learning about the actual physics, or at least a closer proximity to it than the overly simplified analogies plaguing most other popular physics books these days.
In summary, I cannot recommend this enough for anyone wanting to understand the state of physics today.
1) It holds no punches in a refreshing and brutally honest assessment of the modern state of physics. Woit holds physics to a justifiably high standard of truth, and that is an edge I feel a lot of other popular physics books lack. We are reading about science after all.
2) It doesn’t hold back on technical details. This may bother some, but as someone who studied physics 20 years ago I crave more depth than what most popular accounts will offer and Woit serves it up. Plenty of it. I feel like I am learning about the actual physics, or at least a closer proximity to it than the overly simplified analogies plaguing most other popular physics books these days.
In summary, I cannot recommend this enough for anyone wanting to understand the state of physics today.
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