PETER WOIT might be an anatomical curiosity. So relentless is his condemnation of superstring theory — a candidate for the Theory of Everything (TOE) — that he must surely own more than one spleen.

The physicist vents it (or possibly them) regularly on his blog, Not Even Wrong, launched two years ago to contest the idea that string theory is the master key to the secrets of the Universe. The title comes across, intentionally or not, as the ultimate scientific insult. It is taken from the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s scathing description of a rival’s theory, meaning that it was so badly formulated that it was impossible even to judge if it was wrong.

Now Woit has turned his thoughts into a book of the same title. It attacks not only the lack of experimental evidence for superstring theory, but also argues that it has crowded out other worthy research. Its dominance, he thunders, means that even superstring sceptics, if they want a career, are forced to worship at its altar.

Not Even Wrong (Jonathan Cape) isn’t published until Friday, but it inspired a virulent anti-strings tirade in last week’s Financial Times, as well as much online squabbling. The episode is given added piquancy because Woit, based at Columbia University in New York, works down the hall from the theoretical physicist Brian Greene, the prizewinning author and TV presenter who passes for the pin-up of the superstring movement.

Let’s backtrack a bit. Physicists believe in simplicity and unity. They think that, somewhere out there, lies one single TOE that can explain — and predict — absolutely every physical phenomenon that the Universe can throw at us. In the Seventies, along came a promising TOE candidate called the Standard Model, which was so good that it even predicted, successfully, particles that had yet to be found. But it had an Achilles’ heel: it couldn’t link the gravitational force to the other three fundamental forces (strong, weak and electromagnetic).

In the Eighties superstring theory looked as if it could repair the anomaly. This posited that all matter is made up of one-dimensional strings that vibrate; different vibrational frequencies correspond to different particles. And, lo, there appeared to be a vibration that “looked” like a graviton, the particle thought to transmit the gravitational force! Physicists went string crazy. New maths was invented, pioneered by the dazzling Princeton physicist Ed Witten, who is referred to as the new Einstein.

But there is one problem: we can’t find out if strings exist. The energies required to conjure them out of the ether lie beyond the reach of atom-smashers; in any case, physicists aren’t sure what they’d be looking for. “This is a ‘theory’ that makes no predictions, not even wrong ones . . .” Woit writes. If the theory can’t be tested, it can’t be knocked down. (The philosopher Karl Popper articulated as much when he said that, for a theory to count as science, it needed to put up predictions that could be falsified).

And so, guided by the guru-like Witten — named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2004 — and unconstrained by the need to fit with experiments, superstring has reigned supreme without actually proving itself. In the Nineties several versions of superstring theory were united into one over-arching concept that Witten christened the M-theory, without specifying what the M stands for.

Some have suggested membrane, matrix, mother or magic; Woit says it might as well be “mythical”. Researchers need, he says, “to acknowledge that this particular speculative idea doesn’t really work and there aren’t any obvious good ideas out there”.

I’d like to know, of course, whether Woit and Greene share any departmental bonhomie. Oddly, Greene does not appear in the acknowledgments. Woit has also sniped that aesthetics is no substitute for experiment; just because a theory is “elegant” or “beautiful”, doesn’t mean that it’s right. Is this is a dig at Greene, whose first book was called The Elegant Universe?

“We get along fine,” Woit told Discover magazine. “He’s a very reasonable guy. We disagree about string theory to some extent, but unlike a lot of other string theorists Brian is certainly someone who is willing to publicly admit that string theory is something that may very well be wrong.”

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