Smolin argues carefully that the most mathematically and philosophically compelling way to think about gravity is through background independent theories. You have probably heard some claim to the effect that superstring theory naturally requires and predicts gravity. The second element has to do with general relativity, and is particularly emphasized by Smolin’s book. This forms the basis for much of the philosophical critique. By itself, this wouldn’t be so worrisome if it weren’t for the fact that superstring theories don’t look verifiable or falsifiable even in principle. This is apparently historically unprecedented. Despite more than 25 years of development, it still has no experimental support or any realistic hope of experimental support in the near future. Superstring theory has dominated fundamental physics since around 1980. The first is the lack of experimental evidence.
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The technical critique hinges on two major elements and several minor ones. Each book, by itself, provides a critically incomplete look at the situation, but taken together, they provide a reasonably complete assessment. By contrast, despite his best efforts, Woit’s writing reads like a thinly-veiled polemic in parts. A deep love of physics permeates every page of the book, and Smolin tries his best to base his conclusions on a sophisticated (and classical) understanding of what legitimate science is about. Smolin himself is a respected physicist (now at Canada’s unique Perimeter institute) who has published extensively in both superstring theory and one of the alternatives you don’t hear about - general-relativity based quantum gravity. First, it is better structured and you’ll get a lot deeper into it before floundering (if you are a non-physicist and you actually think you understand non-mathematical popular physics books, you are either deluded or a closet prodigy). Technically, Woit focuses his critique primarily on the structure of the quantum physics aspect of the field. But the overall sociological and philosophy-of-science argument is straightforward enough to follow. If you are not a physicist, but have training in some other mathematically-oriented discipline, you’ll probably get about a third of the way through the book before you start to drown. Unlike most popular science authors, Woit doesn’t attempt to make the reader feel like a genius. Had Woit carefully judged his potential audience and picked the appropriate mix of exposition, metaphor and mathematics, the book would have been easier to read, but not been as revealing as it is. This is the less polished of the two books, but paradoxically, more useful and interesting as a result. Peter Woit, now an adjunct at Columbia and author of the Not Even Wrong blog is a physicist by training who shifted to mathematics early in his career. I have rarely been this seriously challenged when reading popular science, and I came out of the experience feeling exhausted, but with a sense that for once, I’d earned that warm glow of wisdom, instead of having been deluded into a false sense of comprehension by a clever writer. Since the authors’ metaphoric/natural language explanations of various technicalities are actually more confusing than the math itself would be, you might want to read the books with wikipedia handy, to look up technical bits and pieces that you think you might understand better if you saw the actual equations. Taken together, the books make for perhaps 3-4 weekends worth of serious reading effort.
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What I learned from these two books is that first, it is not sound even in principle, and second, it is not even a theory at all - just a collection of mathematical clues to the existence of a potential theory. I suspect if you’ve been following physics through casual browsing and media reports like I have, you have probably formed an opinion along these lines: superstring theory is the only game in town, and is basically in good shape except that it cannot be experimentally verified because the energies involved are “too high.” That is, you probably thought it is a sound scientific theory in principle, just not verifiable in practice. It is starting to get seriously interesting again. If you, like me, have been distracted from the foundational problems of physics by the ongoing two-decade fascination with chaos and complexity in the popular literature, now is the time to get back to observing the “deep” stuff.
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Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit and The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin together triangulate the core of the trouble. Two recent popular science books provide a startling peek into the deep scientific and sociological troubles in the world of superstring theory.