Lee Smolin
The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.
Houghton Mifflin, 392 pages, $26
Peter Woit
Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.
Basic Books, 291 pages, $26.95
For more than thirty years, string theory has been what Murray Gell-Mann called “the only game in town.” By this he meant that it was the only good candidate for a TOE, or Theory of Everything. Not only does it claim to unify relativity and quantum mechanics, it also explains the existence of all fundamental particles. Instead of being “pointlike,” they are modeled by filaments of energy so tiny that there is no known way to observe them or even to prove they are real.
A string can have two ends or be closed like a rubber band. Of great tensile strength, strings vibrate at different frequencies. They live in a space of ten or eleven dimensions, of which six or seven are “compacted” into inconceivably minute structures attached to every point in our four-dimensional spacetime. The simplest vibration of a closed string produces a graviton, the quantized particle of gravity. One of string theory’s earliest triumphs was forcing the reality of gravitons.
After an obscure, bumbling start, string theory slowly began to gain momentum until it became the hottest topic in physics. Thousands of papers were published and thick textbooks written. The fastest way to
