Book description
Not Even Wrong is a fascinating exploration of our attempts to
come to grips with perhaps the most intellectually demanding puzzle of
all: how does the universe work at its most fundamnetal level?
The book begins with an historical survey of the experimental and
theoretical developments that led to the creation of the phenomenally
successful 'Standard Model' of particle physics around 1975. Despite
its successes, the Standard Model does not answer all the key
questions and physicists continuing search for answers led to the
development of superstring theory. However, after twenty years,
superstring theory has failed to advance beyond the Standard Model.
The absence of experimental evidence is at the core of this
controversial situation which means that it is impossible to prove
that superstring theory is either right or wrong. To date, only the
arguments of the theory's advocates have received much publicity.
Not Even Wrong provides readers with another side of the story.
Peter Woit is a physicist and mathematician who is currently a
Lecturer in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University. He
graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's
degrees in physics, then went on to get a Ph. D. in theoretical physics
from Princeton University. He has been a postdoc at the Institute for
Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook and at the Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute at Berkeley. Since 1989 he has been teaching at
Columbia where in recent years he has taught graduate courses in quantum
field theory, representation theory and differential geometry.
