Peter Woit

Peter Woit (born September 11, 1957) is an American theoretical physicist.

He is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University.

Woit graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics.

He obtained his PhD in particle physics from Princeton University in 1985, followed by postdoctoral work in theoretical physics at State University of New York at Stony Brook and mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley.

He spent four years as an assistant professor at Columbia.

He now holds a non-permanent position in the mathematics department, as a senior lecturer and as a departmental computer administrator.

Woit is a U.S. citizen and also has a Latvian passport.

His father was born in Riga and became exiled with his own parents at the beginning of the Soviet occupation of Latvia.

He is critical of string theory on the grounds that it lacks testable predictions and is promoted with public money despite its failures so far, and has authored both scientific papers and popular polemics on this topic.

His writings claim that excessive media attention and funding of this one particular mainstream endeavour, which he considers speculative, risks undermining public faith in the freedom of scientific research.

His moderated weblog on string theory and other topics is titled "Not Even Wrong", a derogatory term for scientifically useless arguments coined by Wolfgang Pauli.

"For the last eighteen years particle theory has been dominated by a single approach to the unification of the Standard Model interactions and quantum gravity. This line of thought has hardened into a new orthodoxy that postulates an unknown fundamental supersymmetric theory involving strings and other degrees of freedom with characteristic scale around the Planck length. […] It is a striking fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this complex and unattractive conjectural theory. There is not even a serious proposal for what the dynamics of the fundamental 'M-theory' is supposed to be or any reason at all to believe that its dynamics would produce a vacuum state with the desired properties. The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion."

Woit, a critic of string theory, has published a book Not Even Wrong (2006) and writes a blog of the same name.

A discussion in 2006 took place between University of California, Santa Barbara physicists at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and science journalist George Johnson regarding the controversy caused by the books of Lee Smolin (The Trouble with Physics) and Woit (Not Even Wrong).

The meeting was titled "The String Wars".