Book review: Not Even Wrong

Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit (damn! That is one determinedly old-skool website) is about The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. I read his blog; it is great, even if I disagree with most of his political takes. I've even listened to some of his lectures on Youtube.

This book is about 1/2 about developments leading up to the Standard Model; about 1/6 thoughts-beyond-the-SM; and about 1/3 String-theory-and-what-is-wrong-with-it. If you blip over the really difficult bits it is fairly easy reading, especially if you have already got some background in strong / weak forces, and some kind of understanding of group theory. If you try to read through all the hard passages (I couldn't), it is hard work, because all that stuff is genuinely hard, and because of course he can only gesture towards explanations in a book like this.

As a summary of to-the-SM I think it is good; it is presented through a symmetry / groups approach, and he gives a lot of credit to Hermann Weyl. I realise now that the SM was "finished" in 1973, and accepted by say 1979, and yet I, going to university around 1983, thought that quarks were only conjectural. Knowledge takes a long time to percolate out, or at least it did then.

His basic complaint is that little of physical substance has happened since then, and so in that sense the book - published in 2006 - is largely up to date. The only thing missing I think is the discovery of the Higgs; there's a point where he notes that one (of several) objection against theory X is that we might not find the Higgs, and / or the mechanism might not work; I think it is now know that it does, though I know I don't understand the details. Since 2006 we've had two more decades of lack of progress in string theory, which IMHO vindicates his essential complaint.

He is polite in almost everything, and I believe tries to be fair to the stringy folk.

Book review: Nettle and Bone

Wiki tells me that Nettle & Bone is a 2022 fantasy novel by Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher. The novel has been described as a dark fairy tale. It won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It is, somewhat self-consciously, indeed a fairy-story-esque novel; "dark" is doubtful; the tone is almost always light and fluffy, and there is a reasonable sprinkling of gentle humour. I don't think it is as good as Uprooted or Spinning Silver but in its own way it is charming. As a negative the prose doesn't quite live up to the story.

I picked this up almost in despair at finding anything in Waterstones that I wanted to read, and found myself enjoying it in its various aspects. For one example, the Fairy Godmother who is weak and near useless only because she refuses to use her real talent for cursing people, and who finally comes into her own at the end when she slips in a "will grow up fatherless" curse on the child.

Some of the Goodreads reviews get a touch carried away about the story being "about" the oppression of women or somesuch; that's an element in the story but really, I think, just an element of the story.

Newsletter 2025

Some people are kind enough to send us newsletters. This is a return, of sorts. I also did this for 2024, if you're interested in history.

The big news for 2024 was Miriam retiring. The big news this year... was me retiring. So far this is going well and I'm not bored.

Miriam spent most of spring on three months away on Retreat, finishing up being Ordained into her buddhist Order.

Of the infants: Daniel remains at Darktrace, with a recent promotion; and Miranda remains at Natwest helping AI make other people redundant, ditto.

We had a summer holiday en famille in Sweden plus little Mi, canoing around Stora Le, a large lake, and indeed the name literally means big lake. There are 428 pictures in the unlikely event of you wanting to see. We cooked over open fires, swam, and slept out in hammocks. And this bookended with weekends in Oslo, and Goteborg and Stockholm.

We've all managed more climbing this year. D is now good enough that, were he female, he would be winning local competitions; the rest of us are at a lower level. Amongst others we made it to Stanage and Froggatt; I made it to Pembroke with the 4C's; and using my new-found free time I wandered around France and Italy and later, the Tirol, finding the snow that my heart desires. I'm still rowing; we went down one over all this year.

On a sadder note, Baby Marbles is no more; she will be remembered each spring when the daffodils come up.