His father was a Harvard-trained lawyer his mother painted abstract art. “There are these mysterious equations that tell you how a star works.” “I really got fascinated trying to learn about these stars,” he recalls. In high school in Darien, Connecticut, he used a backyard telescope to stare at the stars and was turned on to physics by that exact volume, and other books like it. “But it’s actually very precise and testable and actually is real.” “It’s that there’s some kind of almost completely alien and mystical deep understanding of the world that these people are getting,” he says. He flips through the pages to find the actual equations that drew him in to physics. In his cramped Columbia office, where every inch of wall is covered by books and every surface is stacked with papers, Woit jumps from his chair, swipes the papers off a table, and scrambles on top of it to pull his copy of Introduction to Stellar Atmospheres and Interiors from a shelf. He’s not buying it: Peter Woit has been a string theory skeptic for over 10 years. The reaction from the community is plainly evident online, where he is called an “incompetent, power-thirsty … moron” and a “stuttering crackpot-in-chief” guilty of crimes as contemptible as those of Osama bin Laden. He has publicly urged agencies like the National Science Foundation to cut string theory funding. So his blog routinely condemns the theory as a “failure, ” and decries the “faddishness,” “mania,” and “arrogance” of physicists who promote its promise. In contrast, Woit says, string theory’s math is “a gory mess.” He, like many physicists, perceives an intricate beauty in the math underlying successful physical theories like Einstein’s. String theory has taken more than 30 so far. Plus, general relativity took Einstein only 10 years. Such falsifiability is a widely cited criterion for what constitutes science, a perspective usually attributed to philosopher Karl Popper. Had measurements of this effect not agreed with Einstein’s prediction, general relativity would have been disproved. Woit’s major complaint about the theory, then and now, is that it fails to make testable predictions, so it can’t be checked for errors-in other words, that it’s “not even wrong.” Contrast this with general relativity, for example, which enabled Einstein to predict, among other things, the degree to which a star’s light is deflected as it passes the sun. He is called an “incompetent, power-thirsty … moron” and a “stuttering crackpot-in-chief” guilty of crimes as contemptible as those of Osama bin Laden. In 2004 string theory had been a hot research topic for 20 years and “it really wasn’t working.” “There’s this huge public promotion of the theory and there’s all this stuff about how wonderful string theory is …” Woit pauses, shakes his head, and chuckles in disbelief. “This is just getting more and more outrageous, this is just getting ridiculous,” Woit remembers thinking about string theory in 2004, when he started the blog.
String theory proposes to solve this problem by replacing elementary particles with strings as nature’s most fundamental objects. Unhappily for physicists, these two theories are logically and mathematically incompatible. The second is Einstein’s general relativity, which explains the fourth force, gravity, relevant only at much larger scales. The first of these is quantum field theory, which covers the subatomic domain, the behavior of elementary particles, and three of the four forces of nature.
Woit uses it against string theory, that most famous contender for the holy grail of physics: a “Theory of Everything” that would unite the two theories that physicists currently need to describe the universe. Woit’s crime? A blog and a book, both called Not Even Wrong after a famous barb first wielded by physicist Wolfgang Pauli. “I was worried,” said Woit’s longtime girlfriend, Pamela Cruz. Watching Peter Woit lecture on quantum mechanics to a class at Columbia University-speaking softly, tapping out equations on a blackboard-it’s hard to imagine why a Harvard physicist once publicly compared him to a terrorist and called for his death.