But Woit's saga is nonetheless a good tale of how science really happens and the way someone from outside a field's inner circle can sometimes force his way into the debate. And to be sure, the theory hasn't disappeared, not by a long shot. The reversal of fortune for string theory has happened for reasons that go well beyond the publication of Woit's book.
"The fundamentals just weren't there anymore." "String theory was a bubble waiting to be pricked," says Woit, 51. Boom turned into bust university physics departments, which had been rushing to hire young string theorists, suddenly didn't want to talk to them anymore. The timing was good, like a Wall Street analyst calling the top of a market the day before a crash commences. Woit's book got its title from a rebuke once uttered by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (dismissing a muddled analysis of a physics problem, he said, "It's not right.
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