Customer Reviews
Highly useful introduction to gauge theory and Standard Model of particle physics - By: Mr. N. B. Cook, 30 Jan 2008 
From a marketing standpoint, it's probably a pity that Dr Woit has targeted this fairly technical book at a non-technical audience, & that he has included discussion about the failure of string theory. The first section is focussed on explaining mainstream solid particle physics, & this gets fairly abstractin places, but it contains some deep physical insights about the handedness of the weak force, the problems of the Standard Model, & so on that you won't easily understand from any other book. The second half is focussed on the failure of string theory, which is very upsetting because those guys keep hyping abject speculation based on wishful thinking & "groupthink must be right" arrogance.
However, no real harm is done. You can easily skip over the quotations from Richard Feynman, Sheldon Glashow, Gerard 't Hooft & many others attacking string theory for being non-falsifiable religion, & learn about the basic concepts behind the maths of quantum field theory.
Then you can easily find more technical material as you need it. The author has some more mathematical stuff on his university home page, & the book has extensive references for further reading.
The book makes you familiar with the basic wayin which gauge symmetry works & how it connects to particle interactions. A Lagrangian equation is written to describe a field, a path integral is then used to evaluate the action of that Lagrangrian. In practice the path integral, which sums over all possible ways an interaction can occurin spacetime, is expanded into a series of terms each being a power of the strength or coupling constant of the force determining the interaction. Each termin the expansion then represents one member of a set of increasingly complicated types of interaction, which can be pictorially illustrated by a Feynman diagram. Evaluating the sum of the series of terms enables you to work out reaction cross-sections, corrections to the magnetic moments of leptons, or whatever you have set up the Lagrangrian to achieve.
After reading this book, if you have also had some exposure to the kind of maths usedin quantum mechanics & general relativity, you are ready to begin studying books like Ryder's "Quantum Field Theory".
Again, mission accomplished - By: Marion Delgado, 24 Sep 2007 This book was the last straw for me. I substantially curtailed my interestin string-theoretical physics speculation & presentations after reading it. I very much like that it doesn't sell the alternatives, but stays focused on the contrast of the success of the Standard Model & the author's perceived failure of string theory. I happen to think "not even wrong" is a misleading phrase & approach. String "theory" is a not very lively not very productive research programme vs. a unitary theorem that needs to be falsified. It definitely draws more than its share of people & money, & frankly, its most speculative claims are given respect out of all proportion to their absurdity.
It's not typo free but it's extremely accurate. A very sound work from start to finish.
fairly good for what it is is - By: P. SACRE, 21 Sep 2007 
There arein my opinion three books one should read about this issue: first a technical book (there is one by B. Zwiebach) to see what it is about from the expert point-of-view, second a serious critique of String theory (Lee Smolin) & then this one for entertainment. It is true this book contains quite a few technical errors but it is refreshing to see somebody taking such a violent position with respect to the establishment. For good measure you might read (rather than Barton Zwiebach), the popular science books by B. Greene & L. Randall, who support "string" theory (and its descendants).
So no, I do not concurin the blind bashing of this book (by the way I am not a physicist but an engineer who worked at CERN & am interestedin physics on the superficial level).
Bitter emotions and obsolete understanding of high-energy physics - By: Lubos Motl, 18 Sep 2007 
Peter Woit is the owner of a well-known blog that provides high-energy theoretical physics with the same service as William Dembski's ID blog offers to evolutionary biology: it is designed to misinterpret & obscure virtually every eventin physics & transform it into poison - & to invent his own fantasies to hurt science. This makes Woit's blog highly popular among the crackpots, for example some of the reviewers of this book. The book is not identical to the author's blog but it is not too different either.
Parts of this book are fun to read, although they will be too difficult for outsiders. But the text is definitely not a trustworthy source of knowledge about physics. The book can basically be divided into two parts. The first part of the book describes physics from the early 20th century to the 1970s or so. This part covers some standard material as well as some points that have not yet appearedin the popular literature. The early chapters also honestly explain that the author has not done any important workin high-energy physics himself & that he has been isolated from research (and researchers) for the last 20 years. Because of these reasons, I originally rated the book by two stars.
As the focus of the presentation shifts to modern physics since the 1970s or so, an expert recognizes that the author misunderstands some very elementary questions.
The book contains a lot of very embarrassing errors. Let me mention a few examples. Woit originally wrote that the center-of-mass energy of the LHC beams would be 14 GeV, instead of 14 TeV: this error has been corrected after long debatesin which he didn't want to admit any flaws. He incorrectly argues that the neutrinos with electroweak energies interact very weakly. He thinks that higher-dimensional rotations are associated with one-dimensional "axes". He misunderstands how SU(2) can be embedded to SO(4). In his description of the history of supersymmetry, he forgets Pierre Ramond. He writes that the supersymmetric vacua predict a higher vacuum energy than the non-supersymmetric ones.
Also, Woit seems to misunderstand that all of our knowledge of theories such as QED comes from perturbative expansions when he attacks the perturbative method as such. He also misunderstands what "background independence" means. At one point, the author also claims that the primary evidence supporting scientific theories is an authority (Edward Wittenin his case). Even more seriously, he builds his case upon e-mail messages from undetermined sources that supported Woit's viewpoint. Most of these e-mails were obviously written by cranks.
Authorities play an important role & the author quotes many outsidersin high-energy physics who have criticized string theory. But he never mentions names like Weinberg, Gell-Mann, Hawking, Randall, Arkani-Hamed - famous & active physicists who are not string theorists but who believe that it is the right direction. Books by Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, & others were much more balancedin this respect. The book is a gigantic spin zone.
Woit conjectures the existence of singularitiesin some integrals that appearin string theory & that are known to be non-singular. Woit does not distinguish a family of theories from one theory with a massless scalar field (a modulus). He does not mention Andrew Strominger & Cumrun Vafa when the black hole entropy is discussed. Woit incorrectly believes that the "beauty" of a theory is the same thing as an experimental verification.
The author repeats poisoned remarks about string theory too many times. The second part of the book could be reduced by 60 percent or so. Moreover, most of the statementsin the second part of the book are supported by no technical arguments, neitherin the book norin scientific literature. The problematic statement that string theory makes no prediction is repeated hundreds of times, &in many particular contexts, such a statement becomes not only boring but also patently false. The author is not aware (or denies) the actual mechanisms that are considered to be solutions of various puzzles - for example the doublet-triplet splitting problem.
The book is also full of inconsistencies. In one chapter, he argues that the alternatives to string theoryin the field of quantum gravity should be supported. In the following chapter, he argues that they should be suppressed - the work of the Bogdanoff brothers is one of his examples. Woit's knowledge of the history of the subjects he discusses is extremely superficial, too. For example, Leonard Susskind is painted as the discoverer of the large number of vacuain string theory. Quite obviously, Peter Woit has no idea about the "discretuum" described by Bousso & Polchinski & many other concepts that have been discussed for years.
Peter Woit also offers a highly obsolete view on many conceptsin theoretical physics such as the gauge symmetry; he is obsessed with the old-fashioned idea that all of physics follows from a gauge symmetry principle. He thinks that the gauge symmetry is uniquely determined by physics because he is apparently unaware of dualities & all other phenomena discoveredin the last 20 years that show that his preconceptions are wrong & that gauge symmetries are only associated with a particular description of physics that does not have to be unique.
The book is called "Not Even Wrong" but the readers should know that most of the book is wrong after all. I can only recommend the book to the people who dislike theoretical physics - or at least theoretical physics of the last 20 years - & who want their opinion to be confirmed by a semi-serious source. The readers who want to learn what physics is all about may want to avoid the book because it could make them very confused. As far as modern physics goes, the author is a layman. The topics he raises have nothing to do with the actual discussions that take place among the scientists.
What went wrong? - By: Don Ramsey, 15 Sep 2007 I bought this book & took it on holiday this summer, hoping to enjoy reading a new insight into string theory,in layman's terms.
I found the book unusually hard going, & simply gave up only a quarter of the way through!
If the objective was to give a critique of string theory which could be understood by a layman, albeit one interestedin the subject, I think it failed dismally.
I abandoned the bookin the wilds of British Colombia rather than bring it home!
