Peter Woit

Woit was drawn to physics in high school in Darien, Connecticut, through stargazing and books on stellar physics; his father was a lawyer and his mother painted abstract art.⁠[1]

He received a B.A. and M.A. in physics from HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry in 1979 and later a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from PrincetonPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry.⁠[2]

He was a postdoc at the Stony Brook Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1984–1987 and at MSRI in BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry in 1988–1989.⁠[2]

He arrived at Stony Brook at the start of the first string revolution but did not take up string theory; he later switched to mathematics, holding an unpaid post at Harvard and teaching calculus at Tufts University.⁠[1]

He was an assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University in 1989–1993 and the department’s director of instruction and computer manager in 1993–2005.⁠[2]

He was hired by Henry Pinkham, then chair of the department.⁠[1]

He later became a senior lecturer in the department, teaching and doing research, running its computer system and for a time serving as calculus director.⁠[3]

On February 16, 2001, he posted “String Theory: An Evaluation” to arXiv, describing it as a polemical article evaluating string theory from the point of view of a quantum field theorist working in a mathematics department.⁠[4]

That year he also wrote a short article for American Scientist setting out his criticism of string theory; the volume of positive and negative responses was overwhelming, and he decided to expand his ideas into a book.⁠[5]

In March 2004 he started the blog Not Even Wrong, named after Wolfgang Pauli’s put-down; most posts concern string theory and its problems and often prompted arguments with string-theorist bloggers.⁠[6]

His book Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics was published in London by Jonathan Cape in June 2006, with a US edition from Basic Books in September.⁠[7]

The 290-page book first surveys the history of particle physics and then critiques string theory; a review noted that the manuscript had been rejected as too controversial by Cambridge University Press before finding a publisher with Roger PenroseRoger PenroseRoger Penrose is a British mathematician and mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, known for his singularity theorem on gravitational collapse, twistor theory and Penrose tiling; in 2020 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that black hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity.Open the full entry’s help.⁠[8]

In the New York Times Book Review, Tom Siegfried wrote that the book offers intriguing ruminations on the relationship between physics and mathematics but little intelligible insight into string theory itself.⁠[9]

Together with Lee SmolinLee SmolinLee Smolin is an American-born theoretical physicist and one of the founding faculty members of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics who works mainly on quantum gravity; he is a co-inventor of loop quantum gravity and deformed special relativity and proposed the hypothesis of cosmological natural selection. He has written several books on physics for the public, including The Trouble with Physics and Time Reborn.Open the full entry’s similarly themed The Trouble with Physics, published the same year, the book propelled the debate over string theory into national newspapers.⁠[6]

In a December 2006 interview he said his permanent but untenured position insulated him from the political pressures most physicists face, and that he wanted to make blogging less time-consuming in order to research how mathematical ideas about symmetry could be exploited in particle physics.⁠[5]

In September 2016 he wrote for the SciLogs blog of the 4th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, covering laureates such as Michael Atiyah and Vladimir Voevodsky.⁠[10]

In an April 2017 interview with science writer John Horgan he said that results from the Large Hadron Collider showed no evidence of the extra dimensions or supersymmetry string theorists had argued for and that the theory’s internal problems had grown more serious after another decade; he also criticized overhyped claims about fundamental physics.⁠[11]

In November 2017 Springer published his textbook Quantum Theory, Groups and Representations: An Introduction, which he has since continued to revise and expand.⁠[12]

On April 11, 2021, he submitted “Euclidean Twistor Unification” to arXiv, proposing to take the local Spin(4) symmetry of Euclidean space-time as fundamental and gauge its two SU(2) factors to obtain a chiral spin-connection formulation of general relativity and part of the Standard Model gauge fields, using twistor geometry to construct a generation of Standard Model matter fields.⁠[13]

He appeared on episode 246 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose description calls him a theoretical physicist, mathematician, critic of string theory and author of the popular science blog Not Even Wrong; topics included physics and mathematics, the beauty of mathematics, string theory, theories of everything, twistor theory and spinors, and the responsibility of scientists.⁠[14]

On June 22, 2025, he announced on his blog that he would take a one-semester sabbatical from July 1 and officially retire at the end of the year; he said he would no longer teach regularly and would mostly give up his work on the department’s computer system, but would stay in New York and keep coming to the mathematics department most days for research and blogging.⁠[15]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/ (opens in a new window)⁠[14]

Not Even Wrong blog: Public link: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

Columbia University: Official website: https://www.columbia.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]