Credit: Mark Weiss
Not Even Wrong
By Peter Woit
(Basic Books)
The Trouble With Physics
By Lee Smolin
(Houghton Mifflin)
Is string theory like masturbation? In the past, hostile physicists have likened the stringy "theory of everything" to onanism—a self-gratifying dead-end in the search for the Ultimate Answer. It's now been half a century since Albert Einstein's death and scientists still don't have a single overarching theory that reconciles quantum theory and relativity, explaining the behavior of all the particles and forces in the universe. Physicists are stuck with two mutually contradictory sets of rules, while they believe that nature herself has only one law.
Of all the attempts to create a "theory of everything," superstring theory is by far the most famous. Despite the theory's complexity—it posits that the tiniest motes of matter and energy are infinitesimal strings that inhabit 10 or 11 dimensions—it has become a staple of pop-science culture. Popular books, newspaper and magazine articles, websites and TV specials have brought multidimensional mathematics to the masses. As a result, string theory is perceived as the pinnacle of modern physics theory—at least to the cocktail-party cognoscenti. Within the ranks of physics, it gets more complicated.
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Now two books, Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong and Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, attempt to knock string theory off its perch. Together they make some pretty damning claims: both argue that string theory might be fashionable, but that it's a false idol—and that, for all its tantalizing promise, string theory isn't really even science.
The basic complaints aren't new; for more than a decade, physicists, journalists and other critics have argued that string theory has strayed too far from its experimental moorings. A particle accelerator powerful enough to probe the theory directly, for example, would have to be much bigger than the solar system (barring almost unfathomable technological advances). This leaves open the nagging fear that string theory is untestable, and therefore unfalsifiable—which would mean it's natural philosophy rather than science.
Credit: Rodney White
String theory has evolved since the first critics emerged, and, to some extent, so have the arguments against it. For example, within the past few years, some scientists have started attacking the "landscape problem": the idea that there are an immense number of models, based on string theory, that can explain our universe—more models by far, than there are atoms in the universe. But the most powerful anti-string-theory arguments are fundamentally the same as they were a decade ago: that the theory fails to meet the definition of science. Woit and Smolin are the latest to take this tack, but their books go further to express a grim warning that theoretical physics has taken a very wrong turn.