Peter Woit

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Peter Woit standing for a photo at Harvard University

Peter Woit (b. 1957) is a mathematical physicist at Columbia University.

Contents

[edit] Career

Woit graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics. He obtained his PhD in particle theory 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 and now holds a permanent position as "Lecturer in Discipline" [1] in the mathematics department where he runs the computer system, teaches classes, and continues his research activities. While an American citizen, Woit also holds a Latvian passport, since his father went into exile from Riga when the Soviet Union occupied it during World War II.

[edit] Critic of string theory

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. These claim that excessive media attention and funding of this one particular speculative mainstream endeavour risks undermining public faith in the freedom of scientific research. His moderated weblog on string theory and other topics is titled "Not Even Wrong," Wolfgang Pauli's term for scientifically useless speculative theories.

"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."[1]

[edit] Scientific publications

Not Even Wrong cover

Peter Woit has published 8 physics papers over the last 20 years in peer reviewed physics journals and a few more online. Most are available through the SPIRES search engine. His earliest work verified Edward Witten's 1979 quantum chromodynamic formula for the eta-prime mass in terms of the second derivative of the vacuum energy.

Woit argues that there are better approaches than string theory which are not being taken seriously. One line of investigation he has suggested is that "spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking is somehow related to the other mysterious aspect of electroweak gauge symmetry: its chiral nature." In a posting to Not Even Wrong he remarks that

"The SU(2) gauge symmetry is supposed to be a purely internal symmetry, having nothing to do with space-time symmetries, but left and right-handed spinors are distinguished purely by their behavior under a space-time symmetry, Lorentz symmetry. So SU(2) gauge symmetry is not only spontaneously broken, but also somehow knows about the subtle spin geometry of space-time."

Woit believes that a proper investigation of what can be done using the geometry of spinors in just four dimensions (along with many other possibly fruitful ideas) has been prevented by an obsession with theories, such as string theory, that speculate about added dimensions.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Woit, Peter, 2002, "Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch."

[edit] Select publications

  • 1988, "Supersymmetric quantum mechanics, spinors and the standard model," Nuclear Physics B303: 329-42.
  • 1990, "Topological quantum theories and representation theory" in Ling-Lie Chau and Werner Nahm, eds., Differential Geometric Methods in Theoretical Physics: Physics and Geometry, Proceedings of NATO Advanced Research Workshop. Plenum Press: 533-45.
  • 2002, "String Theory: An Evaluation," American Scientist 90(2): .
  • 2002, "Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch."
  • 2006. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory & the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics. ISBN 0-224-07605-1 (Jonathan Cape), ISBN 0-465-09275-6 (Basic Books)

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit"
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