Peter Woit is the author of the book “Not Even Wrong” and writes a blog of the same name. The phrase is attributed to the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, originator of the Pauli exclusion principle and means that an idea, etc, is so badly formulated that it is not even wrong. (More about this phrase.) Peter Woit took the position that String/M Theory is not even wrong.
It has been a few years since his book came out and I have been wondering if he holds the same view. In short, he does. He just posted a list of his “This Week’s Hype” posts for 2011. Here is a bit:
When talking to journalists, string theorists are rarely willing to admit that the hopes of the past couple decades that string theory would make some predictions about LHC energy scale physics turned out to be a dismal failure, and this tends to lead to confused headlines. Besides the LHC though, there’s a huge on-going effort to promote other bogus ‘tests of string theory’.
LHC is Large Hadron Collider where they are searching for the Higg’s particle, among other things.
Whenever I talk to anyone about UFT6, I get asked about string theory. I will continue to be able to refer them to this blog.
Update: String theory and UFT6 are competing theories. Well, Woit says that string theory is not even a theory. That said, most people interested in physics have heard of string theory and essentially no one has heard of UFT6. Peter Woit has a much more fully informed view of string theory and its shortcomings than I do.
My own viewpoint is that string theory is based upon Relativity Theory and Relativity Theory is wrong. Therefore string theory is wrong and there is no point in me pursuing it further.
I am making fair progress in writing up a Crucial Experiment for Special Relativity and UFT6. I hope to finish that in a few weeks and I hope to have a more complete status report on UFT6 after that.