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Cosmology

Cosmology

String theory gets knotted

02 Aug 2006

Not Even Wrong – The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics
Peter Woit
2006 Jonathan Cape
290pp £18.99/$26.95 hb

A tale of two W's

“Not even wrong” was Wolfgang Pauli’s ultimate put-down for any theory he considered wide of the mark. Here it is adopted by Peter Woit – a mathematician at Columbia University – and aimed at the rampant industry of string theory that has mushroomed in the past 20 years, covering elementary particle physics, cosmology and even consciousness. While it is easy to imagine the irascible Pauli’s reaction to string theory, one wonders what he would have made of this book. Not Even Wrong emerged from Woit’s popular blog of the same name (www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress), and has already sparked arguments. Woit relates how his manuscript was rejected as too controversial by Cambridge University Press, before finding a high-powered publisher with the help of Roger Penrose.

Woit’s central claim is that not only is string theory wrong, but that it has also tainted the intellectual atmosphere and grabbed far more than its fair share of media coverage. With so many string theorists out there, trying to redress the balance is like spitting in the wind. The problem with the book is that it is really two books. “Woit I” – a brief history of particle physics – takes up the first 146 pages. Strings first appear on, wait for it, page 152, when we embark on the Great String Massacre of “Woit II”. Here the book finally gets into its stride, and becomes quite entertaining. But to get that point means traversing the long, rambling and inaccurate Woit I, and many readers will jump off before getting to the destination. This reviewer nearly did.

In Woit I, concepts and personalities zoom across the page at a baffling speed, with a level of detail that is unpredictable. Sometimes this is insufficient – on page 23 we are hit with the “strong interaction” and “synchrotron radiation” without being told what they are. Elsewhere we encounter, “Early work on current algebra during the 1960s had turned up a rather confusing problem which was dubbed an ‘anomaly’. The source of the difficulty was something that had been studied by Schwinger in 1951… [This] Schwinger term was causing the Hilbert space of the current algebra to not quite be a representation of the symmetry group of the model.” Got it? There is a lot more like that in Woit I.

This mayhem is not helped by errors and deficiencies: Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus at Manchester, not Cambridge, and using alpha particles (as stated correctly on page 19) not electrons (page 87). The ISABELLE experiment (by then called something else) at Brookhaven was cancelled while plans for the US Superconducting Supercollider were taking shape, not before, and it had no “competing collider” at CERN. Without further explanation, readers will be bemused to learn that neutrinos pass straight through the Earth but still pose a radiation problem when generated in new muon colliders. The picture of the global particle-physics scene painted in Woit I is also slanted towards the US: there is plenty about neutrino experiments based at Fermilab, but no mention of major projects elsewhere. I could go on.

Emerging from the fog of Woit I is the saintly figure of Hermann Weyl, who single-handedly did much to improve the mathematical footing of physics in the early 20th century. Indeed, aside from damning string theory, Woit’s major theme is how physics and mathematics are intertwined disciplines, dancing closely together but not always in step.

Finally arriving at Woit II, any remaining readers are rewarded, though ironically Woit himself says just the opposite: “Readers who like their science always to be inspirational are advised that now may be the time to stop reading this book.” The author relates vividly how the theoretical-physics community appears mesmerized by the brilliance of Edward Witten. While himself being impressed by Witten’s intellect, Woit depicts him as a Pied Piper of Princeton, luring gullible theorists off to dark destinations. Witten is the counterpart for the latter half of the 20th century to Weyl in the first half, but in Woit’s eyes he does not achieve the intellectual honesty of Weyl – even if Weyl was having an affair with Frau Schrödinger!

The ultimate judge of any physical theory should be comparison with experiment, and Woit duly underlines string theory’s miserable score on this count: “Not a single experimental prediction has been made, nor are there any prospects for this to change soon.” He adds a pithy remark by Feynman: “String theorists don’t make predictions, they make excuses.” While most string theorists are honest, Woit uncovers cases of dishonesty and outright fraud, such as the episode in 2002 involving the brothers Bogdanov, a string-theory version of the infamous Sokal hoax.

While in previous epochs theoretical physicists had to scamper to keep pace with mathematicians like Weyl or David Hilbert, the situation is now reversed. Problems related to field theory appear high on the mathematical agenda, with heavyweights such as Roger Penrose, Michael Atiyah and Alain Connes contributing. Long may the subtle interplay of mathematics and physics continue, Woit argues, provided it is done outside “the now-ossified ideology” of supersymmetry and string theory. On the jacket, Penrose calls Not Even Wrong “compulsive reading”. Penrose is not like other people – he is extremely bright and can churn out industrial-strength mathematics. Maybe his assessment is correct for Woit II, but not when it is prefaced by the disappointing Woit I.

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