The Admiral of the String Theory Wars

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.

“I was worried,” said Woit’s longtime girlfriend, Pamela Cruz. “Sleep was lost.”

Woit’s crime? A blog and a book, both called Not Even Wrong after a famous barb first wielded by physicist Wolfgang Pauli. 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.

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. The second is Einstein’s general relativity, which explains the fourth force, gravity, relevant only at much larger scales. Unhappily for physicists, these two theories are logically and mathematically incompatible. String theory proposes to solve this problem by replacing elementary particles with strings as nature’s most fundamental objects.

Woit doesn’t buy it.

“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. “There’s this huge public promotion of the theory and working.”