Peter Woit

Peter Woit
250px Peter Woit at Harvard University
Born	(1957-09-11) September 11, 1957
Residence	New York
Nationality	American
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	Columbia University
Alma mater	Harvard University Princeton University
Doctoral advisor	Curtis Callan
Website math.columbia.edu/~woit/

Peter Woit (/ˈwɔɪt/; born September 11, 1957) is an American theoretical physicist. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Woit is especially known for his criticism of string theory in his book Not Even Wrong, and also for his widely-read blog of the same name.

Career

Woit graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics. He obtained his PhD in particle theory from Princeton University in 1985, followed by postdoctoral work in theoretical physics at State University of New York at Stony Brook and mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. He spent four years as an assistant professor at Columbia. He now holds a permanent position in the mathematics department, as Senior Lecturer and as Departmental Computer Administrator.

Woit is a U.S. citizen and also has a Latvian passport. His father was born in Riga and he and his parents became exiled at the beginning of the Soviet occupation of Latvia.

Critic of string theory

He is critical of string theory on the grounds that it lacks testable predictions and is promoted with public money despite its failures so far, and has authored both scientific papers and popular polemics on this topic. These claim that excessive media attention and funding of this one particular speculative mainstream endeavour risks undermining public faith in the freedom of scientific research. His moderated weblog on string theory and other topics is titled "Not Even Wrong," Wolfgang Pauli's term for scientifically useless speculative theories.

For the last eighteen years particle theory has been dominated by a single approach to the unification of the Standard Model interactions and quantum gravity. This line of thought has hardened into a new orthodoxy that postulates an unknown fundamental supersymmetric theory involving strings and other degrees of freedom with characteristic scale around the Planck length. […] It is a striking fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this complex and unattractive conjectural theory. There is not even a serious proposal for what the dynamics of the fundamental 'M-theory' is supposed to be or any reason at all to believe that its dynamics would produce a vacuum state with the desired properties. The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion.

"The String Wars"

A discussion in 2006 took place between University of California, Santa Barbara physicists at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and science journalist George Johnson regarding the controversy caused by Lee Smolin and Woit's books. The meeting was titled "The String Wars" to reflect the impression the media has given people regarding the controversy in string theory caused by Smolin and Woit's books. A video of the proceedings is available at UCSB's website.

Select publications

• 1988, "Supersymmetric quantum mechanics, spinors and the standard model," Nuclear Physics B303: 329-42.
• 1990, "Topological quantum theories and representation theory" in Ling-Lie Chau and Werner Nahm, eds., Differential Geometric Methods in Theoretical Physics: Physics and Geometry, Proceedings of NATO Advanced Research Workshop. Plenum Press: 533-45.
• 2006. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory & the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics. ISBN 0-224-07605-1 (Jonathan Cape), ISBN 0-465-09275-6 (Basic Books)

See also

• The Trouble with Physics
• Lee Smolin

External links

• 2002, "String Theory: An Evaluation," American Scientist 90(2): .
• 2002, "Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch."
• Peter Woit's Home Page.
• Not Even Wrong, Woit's weblog.
• "The Unraveling of String Theory," by Michael Lemonick, Time, August 21, 2006.
• Joseph Polchinski (2007) "All Strung Out?" a review of The Trouble with Physics and Not Even Wrong, American Scientist 95(1):1.
  • Smolin's comment and Polchinky's response.
• Radio Interview from This Week in Science September 19, 2006 Broadcast.
• SPIRES publications for Peter Woit.
• The Times "Review" of Not Even Wrong.
• Video of discussion/debate with Peter Woit on Bloggingheads.tv
• Response by Luboš Motl