Blog Wars and String Wars | Big Think

Blog Wars and String Wars

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From hostile physicists to commenters who think they know more about string theory than Nobel laureates, Peter Woit describes the weird world of science blogging.

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Peter Woit:

Peter Woit is a mathematical physicist at Columbia University. He graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics and obtained his PhD in particle theory from Princeton University in 1985. A prominent critic of string theory, he published a book on the subject, Not Even Wrong, in 2006, and maintains a blog of the same title.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How does blogging affect your relationship with other people in your field?

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Peter Woit: So, there's actually kind of two things. One is the blog and I also wrote the book. Anyway, for many years I wasn't very happy with what was going on there and I was kind of observing it. Okay, this is becoming more and more problematic. There is this - not only are people not admitting that this isn't working out, but there's this whole - there's a lot of public promotion of the subject and it's very difficult and complicated and a lot of people don't understand it, and so this is not really a healthy situation. Someone should kind of clearly explain to the larger community of physicists and also to non-physicists exactly what the situation is here. And so I wrote an article about this and then I finally wrote this book and it took a while to get the book published. It's a long and interesting story, but then while - I guess it was after the book was written, I also started to see there were a couple of other physicists who had started blogs and I thought, well this is interesting thing to do and I can both talk about the issues related to String Theory and things which I was trying to get through the book but also kind of follow it on a day-to-day basis. And also write about whatever I'm interested in. So, the blog, I guess, I don't worry about the audience for it, it's kind of written just very much whatever I would like to read. So, I'm kind of writing whatever I would like to read. So, if there is somebody out there exactly me, they must find this really fascinating, and if there's someone quite different, then they're probably not at all interesting.

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And so because of that, the kinds of things on the blog are often - if I learned something or something new or interesting is going on even in pure mathematics, I'll be writing about that, or pretty much anything going on in between mathematics and physics I'll be writing about that. I'll be writing a lot about the LHC and also just about whatever is going on in the controversy over this String Theory, and it's interesting that more keeps happening with that. My book came out and there's a book by another physicist with a similar point of view as mine and it all came out, so that caused a lot of controversy so a lot of reviews and a lot of argument going on, on the blogs and a lot of people refer to this as the String Wars and so there's this very - for a year or two there, there was a kind of very interesting, if you're interested in this kind of thing, there was a kind of warfare in terms of blog postings and comments going on, on my site and various others and that sort leads to all sorts of strange things.

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Question: Do your readers ever provide useful insights into physics problems?

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Peter Woit: Well, there's some - it depends. I often learn interesting things from comments. So, now that the blog is fairly well-known, people will write in comments to my blog and often telling me something about something that I hadn't heard about. And that's interesting, or they'll often send to me privately by email saying, hey you might be interested in this, so I get a lot of that and learn a lot that way.

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