Peter Woit

Peter Woit
Peter Woit at Harvard University
Born	(1957-09-11) September 11, 1957 (age 59)
Residence	New York
Nationality	American
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	Columbia University
Alma mater	Harvard University Princeton University
Doctoral advisor	Curtis Callan
Website math.columbia.edu/~woit/

Peter Woit (/ˈwɔɪt/; born September 11, 1957) is an American theoretical physicist. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Woit is especially known for his criticism of string theory in his book Not Even Wrong, and also for his widely read blog of the same name.

Woit graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics. He obtained his PhD in particle physics from Princeton University in 1985, followed by postdoctoral work in theoretical physics at State University of New York at Stony Brook and mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. He spent four years as an assistant professor at Columbia. He now holds a permanent position in the mathematics department, as Senior Lecturer and as Departmental Computer Administrator.

Woit is a U.S. citizen and also has a Latvian passport. His father was born in Riga and he and his parents became exiled at the beginning of the Soviet occupation of Latvia.

He is critical of string theory on the grounds that it lacks testable predictions and is promoted with public money despite its failures so far, and has authored both scientific papers and popular polemics on this topic. His writings claim that excessive media attention and funding of this one particular mainstream endeavour, which he considers speculative, risks undermining public faith in the freedom of scientific research. His moderated weblog on string theory and other topics is titled "Not Even Wrong", a derogatory term for scientifically useless arguments invented by Wolfgang Pauli.