The Admiral of the String Theory Wars - Issue 24: Error
▻http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/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 (...)