Steve Hemingway

I have to record the fact that I went to hear Dr Peter Woit speak yesterday. The subject was essentially the subject of his book, 'Not Even Wrong'. I have not read it. I would love to read it, but I'm not sure that I will ever manage to do so.

This is an important book. Physics, the dominant science of the last century is in trouble in this area. It remains a hugely successful academic discipline, and its rigor and deep truth give it a status that all other sciences aspire to.

A few things from the talk stood out, for me:

1. Peter Woit said that most professional physicists had as much understanding of string theory as the average layman had about General Relativity,
2. That getting a superficial understanding of the field required years of study by the brightest students at Princeton,
3. That the last 30 years had produced any experiment that shows any problem with the 'Standard Model',
4. Peter's book 'Not Even Wrong' has gone into paperback - surely the first time a book (obliquely) about String Theory has done this,
   
5. Lee Smolin's book, 'The Trouble with Physics' causes books like these to be considered a zeitgeist, and therefore caused them to be reviewed in prestigious non-technical journals, causing them to have much higher sales than might have been expected,
6. That Cambridge University Press chickened out of publishing the book, although academic referees were evenly divided on its merits
7. That a junior faculty member at Harvard had issued death threats against Woit because of his published views on string theory (surely a first)

The audience really didn't do the speaker justice. Very few of us had bothered to read the book, and some of those in attendance had a shocking ignorance of the subject. Unfortunately both the talk and the questions tended to be neither about string theory, nor the nature of the problems with it, but about the trivia around it (as maybe the list above illustrates).

References


Peter Woit's blog

Amazon Review by Lee Carlson
End

Entry originally made 23 April in Livejournal blog.