The mathematics building at Columbia University is a stately neoclassical affair designed, like much of the campus, by McKim, Mead & White in the 1890s, and it reflects a period of considerable confidence in the state of the world and academe’s place in it. These are temples of learning, of truth. Inside the mathematics building, however, there is a rabbit warren of tiny offices reflecting the far more improvisational nature of the intellectual enterprise as it is practiced these days in science. Peter Woit, a fortyish man with waning hair, a sheepish, post-hippie demeanor, and three degrees in physics, two of them from Harvard, occupies one of the larger ones. “It’s just luck,” he says with a shrug. “I happened to be hanging around when the designer was deciding on the layout.” It didn’t hurt that, besides being a lecturer in mathematics, Woit has the responsibility of keeping all the department’s computers running, making him its one indispensable man.

Ironically, it may be because Woit is such an outlier that he is well positioned to challenge the reigning theoretical principle of current-day physics, the much-ballyhooed string theory. String theory has been called the “Theory of Everything,” for its supposed ability to fulfill Einstein’s dream of uniting the previously irreconcilable forces of gravity, which pulls large bodies, and the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces that jiggle infinitely tiny ones. It is solidly entrenched in all the premier physics departments of the nation, Harvard included. Woit has brazenly taken them all on in Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law, a sweeping indictment of the field, heavy on arcane detail. The title, which is also the name of Woit’s popular blog, comes from Wolfgang Pauli’s scathing put-down of ideas that were too nebulous even to consider.

Predictably, most string theorists have slammed the book. But its contentions have been welcomed by theoretical physicists who have seen string theory suck up the oxygen that might go to what they view as more promising endeavors. Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize–winning university professor at Boston University, did early work developing the ideas that string theorists later seized upon. In 1986, he and a colleague wrote that string theory had yielded “not one verifiable prediction, nor should any soon be expected.” He said he considers a big book like Woit’s long overdue, because “string theory has gone exactly as we imagined.” If anything, he adds, “it’s even worse than it was.” Adds Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, another pre–string theory theoretician: “The critics are quite right. We have no single prediction of string theory that is verified by observation. Even worse, we don’t know how to use string theory to make predictions. Even worse than that, we don’t really know what string theory is.”

Woit was doing postdoctoral work at SUNY–Stony Brook when string theory hit in the mid-’80s. He steered clear, unwilling to commit to a field simply because higher-ups deemed it trendy, and concentrated on the mathematics of the particles of the so-called Standard Model. While the strings were all dubious conjecture, he figured the particles were undeniable, the laws governing them worked out with great precision. This has led his detractors to accuse him of sour grapes, but Woit expresses no regrets about that. His real regret, he says, is not accepting an offer to join the Bay Area startup headed by his Princeton roommate Nathan Myhrvold, which came in around the same time. The company was being snapped up by Microsoft, where Myhrvold was made chief technology officer. “When Nathan comes to visit, he flies in by private jet,” Woit says.

As an outsider, and a rather unkempt one at that, Woit is the polar opposite of his Columbia colleague and fellow Harvardian, the handsome, mediagenic Brian Greene, who exemplifies much of what Woit is up against. He holds a joint appointment in mathematics and physics and, having written the brilliant bestseller The Elegant Universe and starred in its three-hour version on PBS, is probably the nation’s most visible proponent of string theory. Remembered as a “showman” by physics professor Arthur Jaffe at Harvard, where he performed in musicals, Greene played a cameo role in the film Frequency and advised fellow alum John Lithgow on how to salt the scientific dialogue for his TV series 3rd Rock from the Sun with terms like “quark jets” and “quantum chromodynamics.” He has devoted much of his scientific career to string theory and created a center to study it at Columbia—the grandly named Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. And he remains enthusiastic. “String theory harbors within it many of the breakthroughs that scientists toiled to discover over the last 100 to 200 years,” he told me recently, “and that’s enormously impressive.”

While Woit is rarely out of his office, Greene is so much in demand that it took me nearly a dozen phone calls and e-mail messages to catch up to him, and then only to speak over the phone. He calmly defused Woit’s bomb, saying such a view “shows the health of the field.” But the day after we spoke, he published a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times, defending string theory in the lyrical terms he is famous for. “It’s as if one composer,” he wrote, “working in isolation, produced the greatest hits of Beethoven, Count Basie and the Beatles.” Well into the piece, he did concede that “a small but vocal group of critics” has complained the theory has yet to “make predictions that are confirmed by experiment.” But he assured readers that string theorists were determined to do just that possibly as soon as next year, when the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever, comes online at CERN in Geneva. Although Woit was “way down the academic food chain,” as the science writer John Horgan put it, Greene registered his critique. “That op-ed was obviously a rebuttal,” Horgan told me.

While Greene remains unflappable, the book has certainly rattled cages elsewhere. “It’s because I don’t fit into the usual hierarchy that I end up being kind of challenging to people,” Woit says. “It’s like the dominance hierarchy of a chimpanzee troupe. If you start messing with it, you’re going to see a lot of strange behavior, people flinging shit and showing their behinds, and all sorts of strange things.”

Like a rather distressing bit of rhetoric from Lubos Motl, an assistant professor in Harvard’s physics department, on his blog, The Reference Frame. Motl started denouncing the “black crackpot,” referring to Woit’s black book cover, and the “blue crackpot,” the physicist Lee Smolin—another Harvard graduate, now at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario—who, after spending much of his career in string theory, recently published a blue-covered critique, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. According to Woit, Motl declared that Woit’s sins against science were so great, his “otherwise worthless life [was not] a sufficient price to repay his crimes.” A few days later, a posting was made to Woit’s blog by someone identifying himself as Lubos: “Dear crackpot Peter, you are a damn asshole . . . I hope you will die soon.”

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