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Or rather, it makes so many predictions that it cannot be falsified. But even if physicists had such an accelerator, Woit asserts, they still could not confirm string theory because it does not make any precise predictions. Scaling up from this technology, physicists would have to build a particle accelerator 1,000 light years in circumference to probe the micro-realm where strings supposedly shimmy and shake. The large hadron collider, which will be the most powerful accelerator in the world when it comes online next year at Cern, the big particle physics laboratory, is 27km in circumference.
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But his basic points are relatively simple and clearly stated.įirst of all, strings, or membranes, or whatever, are very, very small-as small in comparison to a proton as a proton is in comparison to the entire solar system-and probing these scales requires smashing particles together with enormous force. As a result, his book can be difficult to follow, particularly in the middle chapters where he walks readers through the recent history not only of string theory but of particle physics in general. Unlike string theorists, Woit-who obtained a doctorate in physics from Princeton but later turned to mathematics-does not want readers to take his arguments on faith, and so he lays them out carefully. Woit’s charge is that string theory is so speculative-so utterly disconnected from the physical reality that physicists can actually probe with accelerators and other instruments-that it is “not even wrong.” Woit’s book expands upon arguments that he first aired on a physics website in 2001 and has elaborated on a blog also titled “Not Even Wrong,” echoing the legendary put-down by physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Ironically, Woit then found trade publishers-Cape in the UK and Basic Books in the US-who should help him reach a larger audience. Woit first sent the book to Cambridge University Press three years ago, but the publisher rejected the manuscript after pro-string referees panned it. But Not Even Wrong by the mathematician and physicist Peter Woit of Columbia University is the first book-length critique of the theory. I have also criticised string theory in my 1996 book The End of Science and elsewhere. Richard Feynman liked to say that string theorists don’t make predictions, they make excuses, and his fellow Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow has compared pluckers to medieval theologians debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study and half of its physics faculty are string theorists. Of the 22 physicists who have received their doctorates since 1981 and gone on to receive tenure at the leading physics universities-Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford-20 specialise in strings. The MacArthur Foundation has awarded nine fellowships for particle physics since 1981, and eight have gone to pluckers. Moreover, string theorists dominate particle physics in terms of publications, grants and tenured faculty positions-even though they have not produced an iota of evidence for the theory.
#That is not only not right it is not even wrong series#
Since then, proponents have continued to sing strings’ praises in popular books such as Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku, Warped Passages by Lisa Randall and the monster bestsellers The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene (who also hosted a television series about string theory). In his 1988 blockbuster A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking nominated string theory as the best candidate for a solution to the riddle of the cosmos. Advocates-I will call them “pluckers”-claim that string theory represents a “theory of everything” that will answer the most profound of all questions: how did the universe come to be? And why did it take this particular form rather than some other form that would not have permitted our existence? “String theory is still promising,” I once heard the physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek quip, “and promising, and promising.” String theory is a so-called unified theory, which attempts to wrap quantum mechanics and relativity into one tidy mathematical explanation of all nature’s forces, and it has been promising for more than 20 years now without delivering.ĭepending on which variant you prefer, string theory holds that reality is woven out of infinitesimal strings, or loops, or membranes vibrating in a hyperspace of ten, or 11, or whatever dimensions.