The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I started this up, blogging was all the rage, and lots of other blogs about fundamental physics were starting around the same time. Almost all of these have gone dormant, with Sabine Hossenfelder’s Backreaction one notable exception. She and some others (like Sean Carroll) have largely moved to video, which seems to be the thing to do to communicate with as many people as possible. There are people who do “micro-blogging” on Twitter, with the descendant of Lubos Motl’s blog StringKing42069 on Twitter. I remain mystified why anyone thinks it’s a good idea to discuss complex issues of theoretical physics in the Twitter format, flooded with all sorts of random stupidity.
Looking back on what I was writing 20 years ago it seems to me to have held up well, and there is very little that I would change. The LHC experiments have told us that the Standard Model Higgs is there, and that supersymmetry is not, but these were always seen as the most likely results.
My point of view on things has changed since then, especially in recent years. When I started the blog I was 20 years past my Ph.D., in the middle of some sort of an odd career. Today I’m 66, 40 years past the Ph.D., much closer to the end of a career and a life than to a beginning. In 2004 I was looking at nearly twenty years of domination of fundamental theory by a speculative idea that to me had never looked promising and by then was clearly a failure. 20 years later this story has become highly disturbing. The refusal to admit failure and move on has to a large degree killed off the field as a serious science.
The technical difficulties involved in reaching higher energy scales at this point makes it all too likely that I’m not going to see any significant new data about what the world looks like above the TeV scale during my lifetime. Without experiment to keep it honest, fundamental theory has seriously gone off the rails in a way which looks to me irreparable. With the Standard Model so extremely successful and no hints from experiment about how to improve it, it’s now been about 50 years that this has been a subject in which it is very difficult to make progress. I’ve always been an admitted elitist: in the face of a really hard problem, only a very talented person trained as well as possible and surrounded by the right intellectual environment is likely to be able to get somewhere.
My background has been at the elite institutions that are supposed to be providing this kind of training and working environment. Harvard and Princeton gave me this sort of training in 1975-1984 and I think did a good job of it at the time, but from what I can tell things are now quite different. 40 years of training generations of students in a failed research program has taken its toll on the subject. I remember well what it was like to be an ambitious student at these places, determined to get as quickly as possible to the frontiers of knowledge, which in those times meant learning gauge field theory. These days it unfortunately means putting a lot of effort into reading Polchinski, and becoming expert in the technology of failed ideas.
One recent incident that destroyed my remaining hopes for the institutions I had always still had some faith in was the program discussed here, which made me physically ill. It made it completely clear that the leaders of this subject will never admit what has happened, no matter how bad it gets. Also having a lot of impact on me was the Wormhole Publicity Stunt, which showed that the problem is not just refusing to face up to the past, but willingness to sign onto an awful view of the future, as long as it brings in funding and can be sold as vindication of the past. Watching the director of the IAS explain that this was comparable to the 1919 experimental evidence for GR surely made more than a few of those in attendance at least queasy. This particular stunt may have jumped the shark, but what’s likely coming next looks no better (replace quantum computing with AI).
The strange thing is that while the wider world and the subject I care most about have been descending into an ever more depressing environment of tribalistic behavior and intellectual collapse, on a personal level things are going very well. In particular I’m ever more optimistic about some new ideas and enjoying trying to make progress with them, seeing several promising directions. Whatever years I have available to think about these things are looking like they should be intellectually rewarding ones. Locally, I’m looking forward to what the next twenty years will bring (if I make it through them…), while on a larger scale I’m dreading seeing what will happen.
Update: For a place with extensive comments about this blog posting, see Hacker News.
Hi Peter,
Enormous Congratulations on the 20th Anniversary!
I’ve enjoyed the ride tremendously and looking for what’s new in NEW is always a highlight of the day.
Maybe I should stop harassing you to write about Lean… 🙂
Best wishes for 20 more, or as long as you want!
Peter, I’m glad you’ve hung in there, you’re invaluable for calling out hype and bullshit, as with the wormhole-in-a-quantum-computer story. And I’m glad you’ve found meaning in your own work, even if the world seems to be falling apart. Good luck with it.
Thank you Peter. I’ve been reading for all 20 years and I appreciate that you’ve kept the format, content and tone consistent over all this time. I learn alot here.
Congratulations on 20 years! It’s been enjoyable to read your writing over the years, and it’s been an inspiration to continue my own blog, even though we’re in some post-blogging era now. (Writing on medium or substack may represent some resurgence of long-form blogging, but both platforms have issues.)
Thank you for your work, Peter. I only learned about you a couple years ago after wondering what the physics world was up to after having left it behind when I earned my Ph.D. I’m glad there are people like you out there. You’ve taught me a lot. Please keep writing.
Happy twentieth anniversary, Peter! You’ve created one of the most important blogs in physics, and even in mathematics (surprisingly enough). Your staying resolutely on-point through vast waves of criticism has surely contributed to the important things this blog has achieved — which it certainly has. Thank you for your work, and may it prosper through many more years!
Congrats on the milestone! Although it is indeed regrettable that such a blog is still necessary.
“[Sabine Hossenfelder] and some others (like Sean Carroll) have largely moved to video, which seems to be the thing to do to communicate with as many people as possible.”
Well, that’s an example of the world getting worse, imo: a long time ago, the web used to be full of things to read. It’s become a place of things to watch but for many things videos can never replace the written word.
Dear Peter,
I don’t meant to be melodramatic but your blog was one of the constants in my life. Ever since I did a physics summer program for high school students at Princeton, we little “rebels” would read your blog. When Nova was hawking d-branes, you kept us grounded. When people were fighting pointless wars over black holes, we turned to you for truth.
Thank you so much.
One last request – can you write a book about your human journey? Perhaps less technical than your last, but I would find it a beautiful testament to the life you lived – and the hope you give to others.
Thank you for your blog and your book. I have read it after Green’s The Elegant Universe. It was very good for me at that time to read your book.
Good luck!
Congratulations from Luxembourg!
But StringKing is not Lubos, or is he?
I actually miss Lubos’ blog… it was never dull and always interesting in some way.
Hello and congratulations on these 20 years!
I am not a physicist, I can assure you that the conversations around string theory outside the circle of fundamental physics have changed greatly in the last 20 years.
Nowadays in the world of science, everyone knows, more or less, that string theory has never given anything concrete (and is not at all close to doing so) and, although it is intellectually an interesting construction, it is not a physical theory and I hardly know any scientist who takes it seriously. This is even more visible with the younger generations.
Happy anniversary! Your blog is one of the few I am still reading. Also Scott Aaronson is still around.
Google hasn’t updated the blogger interface for a decade or so. They’ll either have to entirely revamp it or phase it out at some point in the not-so-far future. This is why I have moved my written content to substack, in case anyone is interested https://sciencewtg.substack.com/
(Though I have someone else making the Substack posts on my behalf, the content comes from me.)
Congratulations and thanks! I’ve learned a tremendous amount from you over the years, and I’m grateful for it. Keep it up!
Congratulations on 20 years! I have learned a lot from your blogs.
Nice reminder of how old I am, Dr. Woit.
It’s shocking to realize how long I’ve been reading this blog. Almost as remarkable is how consistently well written and interesting it has been throughout its 20 years of existence.
Thank you, keep up the excellent work, and congratulations!
LMMI
Congratulations and thank you for all these years of thoughtful commentary!!! Your blog has been one of the best sources on the state of high energy physics, and I’ve enjoyed it very much. Your willingness to engage constructively with your critics is impressive and a great example of how intellectual discourse should be conducted.
Congrats on your anniversary, and thanks for saving all those kids from the noodle theory meat grinder. It was a child who pointed out the Emperor’s clothes; that sort of childlike stating of the obvious (the true spirit of science) is a rare quality among adults these days. Being the first man to stand up and duke it out with all those “wicked smaht’ yoyos shows great character.
Often controversial, but always well written and always worth reading. Congratulations on 20(+) years of service to the scientific community!
Thank you for all of your efforts to hold a mirror up to science. It’s only good if it passes close scrutiny.
Congratulations! It’s been wonderful to see you stick to your rational perspective while so many imposing minds seem to have lost theirs. It’s even better to see your research program showing promise and yielding interesting results.
May you have another successful twenty years!
Thank you for keeping this blog going for 20 years. I have always enjoyed reading it. The coverage of both theoretical physics and mathematics is great.
I discovered your blog some time in 2005 and have been a regular reader ever since. Congratulations on 20 years!
Hi Peter,
Congratulations on your 20th anniversary. I don’t remember when I started reading your blog, but I found it an interesting window, with a strong point of view, into what was going on in high energy theory. This is a field I had some contact with in graduate school, but lost touch with after that. After reading the blog for a few years I actually ran into you at a New Year’s Eve party in Brooklyn. Thanks for the public interest talk you gave at Hunter College, which led my English department colleague, Rebecca Connor, to describe the LHC as “the great white whale of physics,” an amusing description that would never have occurred to me. A caution about elitism, though; not all things that are interesting come out of Harvard and Princeton.
You convinced me to leave my two volumes of Green, Schwarz, and Witten (in my defense, acquired in 1996) on the shelf at my last job when I left in 2020. It was a pleasure to meet you about a decade before that and to read this blog since at least 2005. Thanks!
Thank you so much for all that you’ve offered through your blog. You have done a tremendous service to the community of people out there paying attention (in ways technical and not so) to what you’ve shared, and I for one am very grateful. Thank you again.
Hey Peter, huge congrats on the 20th! I’ve always appreciated your principled stance. Here’s to many more!
Incidentally, I was going through some files on my old hard drive this weekend and ended up reading notes about linking numbers via Chern-Simons theory that I wrote for your course. Great stuff — hope that course is still going strong!
Congrats on a great blog from a 20 year reader.
Mark Hillery,
Thanks!
No intention to imply that Harvard/Princeton (or a small list of similar institutions) are the only place that interesting ideas come from. Such institutions though do have outside influence since many people look to them for leadership, they attract outsize amounts of funding and numbers of talented ambitious young people. At the moment they have outsize responsibility for the sad state of the field.
Thinking of cases where new ideas came from outside such institutions, one local example that came to mind is Lenny Susskind’s co-discovery of string theory. His undergrad degree was City College and he did the string theory work while at Yeshiva.
But, maybe that’s not the most convincing example…
Congratulations! I have been following your blog since my undergrad days (also almost 20 years ago now).
Hi Peter,
Congrats on twenty years of chasing your own great white whale! I’ve been avidly following since the beginning and fondly remember our few conversations when I was an undergrad at Columbia in the 90’s. I should have picked your ear more back then in retrospect. I distinctly remember you being much more positive about careers in math than physics. That was of course the right advice…too bad I didn’t take it. To me it was clear that something was amiss with string theory back then and was not something I thought worth pursuing (especially as a grad student at Princeton at the tail end of the 90’s). Still shocking how so few have spoken out about the abysmal situation over the years. What a shame for the great legacy of theoretical physics, now so badly tarnished. Wishing you another twenty years of blogging and even deeper inquiry.
Congratulations on 20 years of worthwhile posts! I’ve been following you for, I think, about 15 of them, and have enjoyed them immensely (bought and very much enjoyed your book, too). I’m an interested amateur fascinated by fundamental physics, and much of it has been over my head, but the learning experience has been wonderful (small steps over time will still get one someplace). Here’s to 20 more!
I’ve noticed a general indulgence in fantasy (science fiction, at best, outright fiction at worst) in our society for many years now. Tragically, it seems even to have infected science: string theory, SUSY, and any multi-dimensional theory are just some examples. Physics seems lost in fantastical musings and wonderings. I’m so weary of “science” articles that center around “maybe”, “might”, and “could”. That’s not science to me, that’s speculation.
And I regret the decline-to-near-vanishing of long-form blogging. Videos have their place, but the written word, I believe, is vastly superior. Much easier to take the time to chew on a single paragraph or to go back and check a part. And many video editors seem compelled to include lots of barely (or not even) relevant stock footage to illustrate and make the video “more interesting” (read: more distracting and annoying).
But I rant when I should instead just raise a glass to your accomplishments! Congrats again!
(BTW: It was fascinating to go back and read your first posts. The comments were *especially* fascinating!)
Congratulations on the 20th anniversary, Peter! I’ve been reading your blog for many years, since around 2012, when I was an undergrad. I think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that you played a significant role (along with Lee Smolin, Sabine Hossenfelder, and others who put an effort into demystifying string theory) in shaping the direction of my physics career, as well as the way I explain physics to the general public.
Congratulations on the Blog Anniversary Peter.
One thing you did not mention in your post is three developments that are due to you.
First and foremost, the appearance of your book “Quantum Theory, Groups and Representations” was an incredible event. That book joins books like “Geometric Quantization” and “Einstein Manfiolds” and “Spin Geometry” as one of the great works of modern scientific exposition of a topic that had previously been scattered in the literature and all but impossible for most to extract. That book also should have silenced any ‘colleagues’ who, in desperation, made attacks about your level of knowledge or understanding (no need to name names).
The next two things are the appearance of two of your own ideas about the origin of our fundamental theories. In one you appear to start with SU(4) as a primative input, quotient out by SU(3) x U(1) to get a world with electro-strong field content and then make arguments about Wick rotating between Euclidean and Lorentzian 4-submanifolds hoping to pick up an extra Weak Isospin SU(2) from the Spin(4) structure. While I don’t personally think that is right, it does immediately provide a concrete world in which to build natural models and explore their consequences.
The next idea about Space-Time being chiral (which I admit I did not realize was a separate program until we talked) was to think about the oddity of how the Weak force is not only chiral but ‘maximally chiral’ in that it is not only a question of a complex representation not being equivalent to its conjugate representation, but SU(2) weak isospin being either ‘on’ or ‘off’ depending on the spinor being either Left or Right and the fields in question being either ‘Matter’ or ‘Anti-Matter’. And here again you were exploring this spinorial idea based on the sui generis nature of our home dimension n=4 being the only one in which Spin(n) is semi-simple. I believe in a version of this, but that is not relevant here. The point is that you are trying to turn the weak assymmetry into a naturally geometric third ‘on-off switch’ after Handedness and Matter/Anti-Matter.
I bring these up in their own right, but since this is ‘Not Even Wrong’ I want to close with how these positive attempts to do new physics interact with the implosion of particle theory.
When you and Smolin wrote your books, I noticed that you were attacked for two different and incompatible reasons. Smolin was misportrayed as writing a self-promotional book to take a cheap shot at the successful community in an attempt to boost his pet theory. You on the other hand were attacked for the opposite reason! “Woit doesn’t have any alternate proposals, so why should he be complaining that there is something wrong?” was the grumbling I heard.
We now know the answer. It doesn’t matter whether you have a theory or do not have a theory of your own. String Theory/M-Theory is, to its faithful DEFINITIONALLY the ‘Only Game In Town’. This is part of a monotheistic religion which insists that there are no other ideas and no critical colleagues. There are ‘only words’ and ‘charlatans, populists and grifters’.
While I don’t agree with your models (yet at least), they are clever and not stupid, and I’m pleased to see you evolve into a colleauge who has proven himself now as a master expositor, and a theorist with your own research program, providing 1-2 other ‘games in town’.
Let me just close by saying that for years, the first place I check when I come back from a trip abroad is this clunky old ‘blog’. Just in case, physics came back to life. Thanks for doing this.
Eric
Love this comment by Oglop in the Hacker News discussion Peter linked to:
“This blog changed my life. I was on a path of going into research in physics, and I remember somehow finding this blog as an undergrad. It was like I was a soviet reading western news. After another year of courses where I began to notice exactly what the author mentioned, string theorists controlling purse strings and research directions, I gave up and left.”
It was like I was a soviet reading western news…wow.
Congratulations Peter, a fantastic achievement.
Have been following your blog for 5 years or so with great interest.
Alway love to see a new entry – bizarrely it was one of the things that kept me going during those awful Covid lockdowns!
Had an instinctive allergy to String theory in my postgrad days back in the mid-90s.
To find someone (along with Smolin) who gave such eloquent voice to these doubts has been a great discovery
Happy anniversary, Peter!!
FWIW, your blog was one of the central inspirations for me to start mine, and in particular, to use it to criticize wild quantum computing claims. Thank you.
Whether I share your perspective, have quibbles, or simply don’t know enough to say, I always find you refreshingly honest and well worth reading. Here’s to many more years, and hopefully new discoveries in physics that surprise everyone and render many old debates irrelevant.
Thank you!
Congratulations Peter. Thank you for maintaining a blog in this crazy field where sanity prevails. I’ve never been a fan of string theory and it is great to read the perspectives of a somebody closer to the fire than I am.
I remind myself that Newton’s theory of light prevailed for a hundred years before it was replaced by a better description. String theory has not been around for a hundred years yet. I do believe it will eventually be replaced. However, Newton’s theory was replaced by something better. So the way to attack string theory is by doing what you are doing: develop a better theory.
Congratulation ! and Thanks a lot.
I read your article, subscribed your blog when I was an undergraduate. Now, I become a faculty in university.
Really hope your texts never disappear in its way as it was.
Congratulations Peter on twenty years of this blog! The blog has been wonderful, and Not Even Wrong (the book) was also a wonderful intellectual contribution. Besides the main feature of your book (holding a critical mirror), the math chapters on topological field theories were extremely well written and I learnt a lot from them.
I’ve been reading your blog for about 14 years. I really appreciate you sticking your neck out time and again. As someone outside of academia who does not personally know any physicists or mathematicians, this blog is one of the few places that I can learn about current developments (or the lack thereof). Heres to another 20+years of blogging! And lets hope the next 20 years will bring a totally unexpected left field (pun?) discovery that will revitalise fuadamental physics.
What are people’s highlights from this outstanding 20-year endeavour? One of mine: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11709
Not even string theory: April 2020, Not Even Wrong hosts the heavyweights of arithmeatic geometry sparring over the ABC conjecture proof controversy.
Robin Whitty,
Yes, on the mathematics side, that was a high point. Thanks go to Peter Scholze for being willing to engage publicly in a detailed technical debate using the comment section here. That was taking place at the height of the Covid lockdown, so it was a bit challenging to moderate that discussion without my usual advantage of having experts down the hall to consult with.
On the physics side, I’d like to point out that the first announcement of the Higgs discovery was not July 4, 2012, but on this blog June 17, 2012, see
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4772
In that case, there are also several experts to thank, but they will remain anonymous.
Both cases show that a main reason for some of the best content that appears here is not my writing, but that a large number of expert physicists and mathematicians appreciate what I’ve been doing over the years and are willing to contribute their own knowledge and expertise to provide material of high-quality.
Peter,
thank you for your example. You live in the way that every human should live: honestly and true to yourself.
All the best for your future.
Christoph
Bravo Peter pour votre endurance à maintenir avec rigueur et constance cette chronique personnelle sur la recherche mathématique contemporaine et en particulier sur la physique des interactions fondamentales !
Merci également pour la convivialité et la qualité des échanges de vue dans votre espace des commentaires, fruit des efforts consacrés à le modérer.
Longue vie encore Ă ce blog et du bonheur pour son auteur.
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert
Congratulations on 20 years! In its way your post was as important as Hilbert’s problems, which outlined a set of mathematical problems he felt were of fundamental importance. Although a few turned out to not be real problems, and a few had solutions that turned out not to be very interesting, the best of them lead to revolutionary changes (arguably the last revolutionary charges so far) in the fundamentals of mathematics and its philosophy.
To stake out the unequivocal claim that string theory will lead to no necessary changes to the standard model and will continue to be nothing but a pernicious intellectual influence on its practitioners a bold, breathtaking pronouncement at the time. It was seminal and points to the grave situation we’re in today — that it’s surprisingly easy for academic institutions to be captured by an ideology which is ‘not even wrong’ and it’s extraordinarily difficult for them to recover from not-even-wrongness.
Dear Peter, my congratulations for the 20 years of “Not Even Wrong” 🙂 This blog, that I have been following from its inception, has been a constant source of critical thoughts on the current developments (and degeneration) in theoretical high energy physics, with inspiring posts on mathematical physics and much more. I would also like to stress not only the “critical” side of the content of the blog, but also the “conceptual” importance of the recent proposals for alternative roads (twistor unification, Euclidean QFT, spinorial geometry) that I find deeply interesting (also in view of some of my current lines of work). I am looking forward to even more exciting developments! Congratulations again 🙂 Paolo
Congratulations Peter for the 20 years of your Blog.
What I like best is your effort to be pedagogical and informative.
I learned a lot from your blog.
PS: Michel Talagrand awarded the 2024 Abel Prize – https://abelprize.no/article/2024/michel-talagrand-awarded-2024-abel-prize
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12819
Hi Peter,
Congratulations in keeping up NEW for so long, I always look forward to reading your posts, keep up the good work.
Cheers, Paul Titze.
Peter, congrats on 20 years of blog.
Once again, you have forgot to mention about neutrino mass which is evidence for Physics beyond standard model.