{"id":515,"date":"2007-02-03T14:31:51","date_gmt":"2007-02-03T19:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=515"},"modified":"2007-03-06T15:37:04","modified_gmt":"2007-03-06T20:37:04","slug":"riordan-review-of-the-trouble-with-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=515","title":{"rendered":"Riordan Review of The Trouble With Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lee Smolin&#8217;s <em>The Trouble With Physics<\/em> will be out soon in the UK, available February 22 according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science\/dp\/0713997990\">Amazon.uk<\/a>.  This month&#8217;s Physics World has a very good review of the book by Michael Riordan, under the title <a href=\"http:\/\/physicsweb.org\/articles\/review\/20\/2\/1\/1\">Stringing physics along<\/a>.   Before his current incarnation as an historian of science, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/dept\/HPS\/riordan.html\">Riordan<\/a> worked as an HEP experimentalist for many years, going on to write one of my favorite books about the development of the Standard Model, The Hunting of the Quark.  <\/p>\n<p>The review is very well done, and I especially like his description of string theory as not a theory, but &#8220;instead a dense, weedy thicket of hypotheses and conjectures badly in need of pruning.&#8221;  The one place where I really disagree with Riordan, is where, like many other people, he explains the landscape issue and characterizes the problem with string theory as &#8220;it got caught up in its own mathematical beauty.&#8221;  I don&#8217;t think that that&#8217;s the problem with string theory in general, and it&#8217;s certainly not the problem with the landscape arm of string theory research, which is explicitly devoted to the idea (see for example Susskind&#8217;s book) that the universe is something of spectacular mathematical ugliness.<\/p>\n<p>Riordan goes on to make the claim that the way string theory is being pursued is of danger to science in general, since its continual evasion of any possibility of confrontation with experiment is of the same nature as &#8220;intelligent design&#8221;.  Riordan writes &#8220;To me, string theory and intelligent design belong in the same speculative, unproveable category.&#8221;  He ends with the recommendation &#8220;<em>The Trouble With Physics<\/em> deserves a wide, careful reading by all physicists concerned about the future of our discipline.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lee Smolin&#8217;s The Trouble With Physics will be out soon in the UK, available February 22 according to Amazon.uk. This month&#8217;s Physics World has a very good review of the book by Michael Riordan, under the title Stringing physics along. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=515\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}