Peter Woit

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Peter Woit at Harvard University

Peter Woit is a mathematician at Columbia University. 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 MSRI in Berkeley. He spent four years as an assistant professor at Columbia and now holds a permanent position as "Lecturer in Discipline" [1] in the mathematics department where he runs the computer system, teaches classes, and continues his research activities.

While an American citizen, Woit also holds a Latvian passport, since his father went into exile from Riga when the Soviet Union occupied it during World War II. 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 point out 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 discussion weblog on string theory and other topics is entitled Not Even Wrong after the category into which scientifically useless speculative theories were dismissed by the discoverer of the exclusion principle, Wolfgang Pauli.

"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." – Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch (2002), http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135

[edit] Scientific publications

Not Even Wrong applies the concept of non-falsifiability to string theory

Peter Woit's earliest work verified Edward Witten's 1979 quantum chromodynamic formula for the eta-prime mass in terms of the second derivative of the vacuum energy.

Woit argues that there are better approaches than string theory which are not being taken seriously. One line of investigation he has suggested is that "spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking is somehow related to the other mysterious aspect of electroweak gauge symmetry: its chiral nature." In a posting to Not Even Wrong he remarks that "The SU(2) gauge symmetry is supposed to be a purely internal symmetry, having nothing to do with space-time symmetries, but left and right-handed spinors are distinguished purely by their behavior under a space-time symmetry, Lorentz symmetry. So SU(2) gauge symmetry is not only spontaneously broken, but also somehow knows about the subtle spin geometry of space-time." Woit believes that a proper investigation of what can be done using the geometry of spinors in just four dimensions (along with many other possibly fruitful ideas) has been prevented by an obsession with extra-dimensional speculations.

"Supersymmetric quantum mechanics, spinors and the standard model", Nuclear Physics, v. B303 (1988), pp. 329-42.
"Topological quantum theories and representation theory', Differential Geometric Methods in Theoretical Physics: Physics and Geometry, Proceedings of NATO Advanced Research Workshop, Ling-Lie Chau and Werner Nahm, Eds., Plenum Press, 1990, pp. 533-45.
Woit, P, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory & the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics, 2006. ISBN 0224076051 (Jonathan Cape), ISBN 0465092756 (Basic Books)