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.