A rare contribution to the rant literature in the sciences

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. By Peter Woit. Basic Books, New York, 2006. ISBN 0-465-09275-6. 304 pp. Hardcover, $26.

The humanities have a genre that might be called, with genuine affection, rant literature. It consists of books--written by insiders, wannabe insiders, or critics, and intended for outsiders--that rage against some fashionable trend that has taken over a discipline. The trend, it is claimed, is not only empty but harmful, for it is cutting off the discipline from its vital taproot. Rant literature aims to expose the vapidity and danger of the trend and hopes thereby to help bring the discipline to its senses. Classic examples of rant literature include Tom Wolfe's books From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), on the empty pretensions of modern architecture, and The Painted Word (1975), on how modern painting sold out to theory. In the performance arts, a classic example is The Agony of Modern Music (1955) by Henry Pleasants, which claimed that modern music had exhausted its resources and was being perpetuated by an entrenched elite whose members were deluding themselves about the music's cultural relevance. Even philosophy has rant literature, such as Paul Nizan's The Watchdogs (1932), which argued that the French philosophical establishment was betraying everything that philosophy stands for.

Rant literature can be instructive and entertaining, if one does not take it too seriously. It is instructive because the reader usually gets an overview of the field's developments, setbacks, and key players. It is entertaining because of the fresh anecdotes and dirty laundry on display, and because the authors' passions about the subject tend to brighten the prose. But because rant literature is usually an exercise in ax-grinding, one must take it with grains of salt.

The sciences have few examples of rant literature. Perhaps this is because the internal mechanisms for guaranteeing quality tend to be stronger than in the humanities, or because of a dearth of genuine science critics. And what would be the point of ranting to outsiders? The sciences are embedded in culture differently, so that outsiders have less leverage to influence trends.

Peter Woit's book Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and The Search for Unity in Physical Law is a rare example of rant literature in the sciences. The discipline is theoretical physics. The fashionable trend is string theory. The vital taproot being threatened is the interaction between theory and experiment. The author is an insider--a Harvard graduate, with a Princeton PhD in theoretical physics, who now lectures in the Mathematics Department at Columbia and writes an anti-string-theory biog. Woit's claim is not so much that string theory is bad theory--in science, after all, it's good to have bad theories, because they challenge you and give you something to work against--but that it's only a promissory note for a theory. String theory is pernicious, Woit claims, because it dispenses with the traditional reliance of physics on experimental data. The title is taken from a famous put-down by Wolfgang Pauli, who once said a colleague's work was so bad it was "not even wrong."

Woit's book is written for a general audience, for those who like books by authors such as Brian Greene. It should therefore be reviewed by the standards of someone who is an interested outsider. That's me, I think; not a physicist but a philosopher and historian of science. I have no competence to judge a work in string theory (though I will say that it's historically true that never have so many theorists been so convinced they can figure out so much with so little guidance from nature). I sit in the bleachers and enjoy the spectacle.

From that vantage, Not Even Wrong is primitive compared to humanities rant literature. It is not as wicked as Wolfe, lacks Pleasants's sustained argument, and is devoid of the almost religious certitude that fortifies Nizan, thanks to his Marxism. The first half covers recent developments in physics. There's an inevitable hand-waving at things that cannot be summarized briefly for a popular audience. And Woit makes a few errors when he is not fully up to date on recent philosophical-historical literature. He repeats, for instance, the widely held claim that Einstein and Pauli decisively refuted Hermann Weyl's work on gauge theory. But philosopher Thomas Ryckman demonstrated in The Reign of Relativity that Einstein and Pauli not only misunderstood Weyl's thrust, but Weyl subsequently reformulated his theory in a way that easily accommodated all the facts mentioned by those two critics--and this reformulation is of enormous significance for relativity theory.

Then Woit turns to string theory, and the fun begins. "Readers who like their science always to be inspirational," he writes, charmingly and disarmingly, "are advised that now may be the time to stop reading this book" and pick up something more inspirational by Brian Greene. Woit's central point is that string theory "isn't really a theory, but rather a set of reasons for hoping that a theory exists" (p. 175). It isn't a theory mainly because it fails to make predictions. Woit dismisses string theorists who offer rationales for this deficiency. Woit cites a remark (but fails to name a source) that string theory is like a "spaceship from the future for which the instruction manual is lacking" (p. 185) thereby setting up his retort, "What if the mysterious gadget that one hopes is a spaceship turns out to be merely a toaster?" And he devotes several pages to insinuating that string theory is akin to masturbation, for both are intense activities that feign, but fail, to connect with the real world. "The question of who is having successful and satisfying intercourse with the deepest levels of reality, and who is just imagining it, still remains to be answered" (p. 191). Not by Woit.