Most of these e-mails were obviously written by cranks.ДЄuthorities play an important role and the author quotes many outsiders in high-energy physics who have criticized string theory. Even more seriously, he builds his case upon e-mail messages from undetermined sources that supported Woit's viewpoint. At one point, the author also claims that the primary evidence supporting scientific theories is an authority (Edward Witten in his case). He also misunderstands what 'background independence' means. He writes that the supersymmetric vacua predict a higher vacuum energy than the non-supersymmetric ones.ДЄlso, 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. In his description of the history of supersymmetry, he forgets Pierre Ramond. He misunderstands how SU(2) can be embedded to SO(4). He thinks that higher-dimensional rotations are associated with one-dimensional 'axes'. He incorrectly argues that the neutrinos with electroweak energies interact very weakly. 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 debates in which he didn't want to admit any flaws. The book contains a lot of very embarrassing errors. Because of these reasons, I originally rated the book by two stars.ДЄs 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 early chapters also honestly explain that the author has not done any important work in high-energy physics himself and that he has been isolated from research (and researchers) for the last 20 years. This part covers some standard material as well as some points that have not yet appeared in the popular literature. The first part of the book describes physics from the early 20th century to the 1970s or so. The book can basically be divided into two parts. But the text is definitely not a trustworthy source of knowledge about physics. Parts of this book are fun to read, although they will be too difficult for outsiders. The book is not identical to the author's blog but it is not too different either. This makes Woit's blog highly popular among the crackpots, for example some of the reviewers of this book. 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 and obscure virtually every event in physics and transform it into poison - and to invent his own fantasies to hurt science. Let's start with my first public review of this book.Д«itter emotions and obsolete understanding of high-energy physics (1 star)

Not even wrong shamit