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For example, Leonard Susskind is painted as the discoverer of the large number of vacua in string theory. Woit's knowledge of the history of the subjects he discusses is extremely superficial, too.
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In the following chapter, he argues that they should be suppressed - the work of the Bogdanoff brothers is one of his examples. In one chapter, he argues that the alternatives to string theory in the field of quantum gravity should be supported.
#WHAT DOES NOT EVEN WRONG MEAN FULL#
The book is also full of inconsistencies. The author is not aware (or denies) the actual mechanisms that are considered to be solutions of various puzzles - for example the doublet-triplet splitting problem. The problematic statement that string theory makes no prediction is repeated hundreds of times, and in many particular contexts, such a statement becomes not only boring but also patently false. Moreover, most of the statements in the second part of the book are supported by no technical arguments, neither in the book nor in scientific literature. The second part of the book could be reduced by 60 percent or so. The author repeats poisoned remarks about string theory too many times. Woit incorrectly believes that the "beauty" of a theory is the same thing as an experimental verification. He does not mention Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa when the black hole entropy is discussed. Woit does not distinguish a family of theories from one theory with a massless scalar field (a modulus). Woit conjectures the existence of singularities in some integrals that appear in string theory and that are known to be non-singular. Books by Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, and others were much more balanced in this respect. But he never mentions names like Weinberg, Gell-Mann, Hawking, Randall, Arkani-Hamed - famous and active physicists who are not string theorists but who believe that it is the right direction. Most of these e-mails were obviously written by cranks.Īuthorities play an important role and the author quotes many outsiders in high-energy physics who have criticized string theory. Even more seriously, he builds his case upon e-mail messages from undetermined sources that supported Woit's viewpoint. At one point, the author also claims that the primary evidence supporting scientific theories is an authority (Edward Witten in his case). He also misunderstands what "background independence" means. He writes that the supersymmetric vacua predict a higher vacuum energy than the non-supersymmetric ones.Īlso, Woit seems to misunderstand that all of our knowledge of theories such as QED comes from perturbative expansions when he attacks the perturbative method as such. In his description of the history of supersymmetry, he forgets Pierre Ramond. He misunderstands how SU(2) can be embedded to SO(4). He thinks that higher-dimensional rotations are associated with one-dimensional "axes". He incorrectly argues that the neutrinos with electroweak energies interact very weakly. Woit originally wrote that the center-of-mass energy of the LHC beams would be 14 GeV, instead of 14 TeV: this error has been corrected after long debates in which he didn't want to admit any flaws. The book contains a lot of very embarrassing errors. Because of these reasons, I originally rated the book by two stars.Īs the focus of the presentation shifts to modern physics since the 1970s or so, an expert recognizes that the author misunderstands some very elementary questions. The early chapters also honestly explain that the author has not done any important work in high-energy physics himself and that he has been isolated from research (and researchers) for the last 20 years.
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This part covers some standard material as well as some points that have not yet appeared in the popular literature. The first part of the book describes physics from the early 20th century to the 1970s or so. The book can basically be divided into two parts. But the text is definitely not a trustworthy source of knowledge about physics. Parts of this book are fun to read, although they will be too difficult for outsiders. The book is not identical to the author's blog but it is not too different either. This makes Woit's blog highly popular among the crackpots, for example some of the reviewers of this book. Peter Woit is the owner of a well-known blog that provides high-energy theoretical physics with the same service as William Dembski's ID blog offers to evolutionary biology: it is designed to misinterpret and obscure virtually every event in physics and transform it into poison - and to invent his own fantasies to hurt science. Let's start with my first public review of this book.īitter emotions and obsolete understanding of high-energy physics (1 star)