Thursday, March 16, 2006

A famous critic of strings

The new WMAP data provide us with a good opportunity for this conundrum. Which book by a famous critic of string theory is described in this amazon.com review? If you know the answer, write one letter of the book's title (including the articles) in the fast comments.
  • ... In section 28.5, after many hundreds of pages, we find out: the tone starts to change. Here [the author] demolishes comprehensively and convincingly, even for laypersons, the Inflationary Theory - a major corner stone of modern Cosmology. In his demolition job he seems to come very near indeed to saying the inflationary physicists are quite stupid: Humanity starts cheering him on. What sort of guide to the TOE can this be? Well, in the following pages, he proceeds to demolish the physics pretensions of most of the mathematical groundwork painfully laid out in the first 800 pages. Unfortunately his demolition of strings, that dodgy life-raft to which most theoretical physicists now cling, is so lengthy and esoteric it can only really be relished by a specialist like himself. But I have no doubt at all that he has hit his intended target.

    [The author] continues with a dismal picture of the state of modern experimental measurement. [The author] describes the National debt-sized expenses, the half a lifetime timescales and the consequential scarcity of experiments. ...