SILLY STRING:

String Theory Skeptic: Outsider Peter Woit is challenging the debate about physics "theory of everything." (Lee Gomes, 09.02.09, Forbes Magazine)

Three years ago [Peter] Woit, who teaches mathematics at Columbia University, published Not Even Wrong. The book combines science and polemics to argue that string theorists were heading down a scientific rat hole, one where fancy math tricks had been mistaken for genuine physics. At the time the conventional wisdom was that string theorists were the best in the business and on the brink of a new revolution on par with Einstein's theory of relativity.

Woit's book got its title from a rebuke once uttered by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (dismissing a muddled analysis of a physics problem, he said, "It's not right. It's not even wrong."). The timing was good, like a Wall Street analyst calling the top of a market the day before a crash commences. Boom turned into bust; university physics departments, which had been rushing to hire young string theorists, suddenly didn't want to talk to them anymore.

"String theory was a bubble waiting to be pricked," says Woit, 51. "The fundamentals just weren't there anymore." [...]

There is no direct evidence that the world really is made of strings; the idea was first proposed simply because it made a certain amount of mathematical sense.

And not even the most overblown bubble.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 3, 2009 9:40 AM