Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law [Paperback]

'Peter Woit's book Not even Wrong is an authoritative and well reasoned account of string theory's extremely fashionable status among today's theoretical physicists...I regard it as an important book.' Professor Sir Roger Penrose, author of The Road to Reality. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

When does physics depart the realm of testable hypothesis and come to resemble theology? Peter Woit argues that string theory isnt just going in the wrong direction, its not even science. Not Even Wrong shows that what many physicists call superstring theory is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish. Peter Woit explains why the mathematical conditions for progress in physics are entirely absent from superstring theory today, offering the other side of the story.

Peter Woit is a physicist and mathematician who is currently a Lecturer in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University. He graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics, then went on to get a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton University. He has been a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook and at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. Since 1989 he has been teaching at Columbia where in recent years he has taught graduate courses in quantum field theory, representation theory and differential geometry. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.