String Theory - Not Even Wrong!

Thanks to Paul Hsieh for blogging about articles on Peter Woit's book that challenge's String Theory. (Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics). Sounds like a very interesting book.

From the Times Online article (see also here), after giving some background on string theory, there is this nice paragraph explaining the book title:

But is string theory true? Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University, has challenged the entire string-theory discipline by proclaiming that its topic is not a genuine theory at all and that many of its exponents do not understand the complex mathematics it employs. String theory, he avers, has become a form of science fiction. Hence his book’s title, Not Even Wrong: an epithet created by Wolfgang Pauli, an irascible early 20th-century German physicist. Pauli had three escalating levels of insult for colleagues he deemed to be talking nonsense: “Wrong!”, “Completely wrong!” and finally “Not even wrong!”. By which he meant that a proposal was so completely outside the scientific ballpark as not to merit the least consideration.

That is superb. I think I had heard of Pauli's tri-partite distinction before, but I am pleased at this reminder, and especially to hear of Not Even Wrong being applied to string theory. I also liked seeing the reference to Horgan's 1995 book The End of Science, and the analogy to deconstructionism in literary criticism.

I've added this book to my mammoth reading list.