Monday, June 12, 2006

"Not Even Wrong": Columbia University mathematics instructor Peter Woit has just written a potentially interesting book harshly critical of modern physics "string theory", arguing that it's not a genuine scientific theory at all because it can neither be verified nor falsified by experimental data. From the article:
Hence his book's title, Not Even Wrong: an epithet created by Wolfgang Pauli, an irascible early 20th-century German physicist. Pauli had three escalating levels of insult for colleagues he deemed to be talking nonsense: "Wrong!", "Completely wrong!" and finally "Not even wrong!". By which he meant that a proposal was so completely outside the scientific ballpark as not to merit the least consideration.