Columbia University Professor, Peter Woit, is interviewed in Discover Magazine’s Feb 2006 edition about his criticisms of string theory and his blog, Not Even Wrong, which gets 5000 hits a day. Calling string theory ’science fiction in mathematical form’, Woit explains why string theory became such a big phenomenon

One of the big factors is that the field is a victim of its own success. The standard model, which was in place by around 1973, has been absurdly successful. There are literally zero experimental results that disagree with this model. Normally, one thing that has kept physics from becoming overly speculative or going off into the wrong direction is that sooner or later an experimentalist comes along and shows you that that was the wrong direction. That just hasn’t happened. Another aspect has to do with Edward Witten, who is the most amazing figure in the field. He legitimately is an incredible genius. And throughout the early eighties he was doing stuff that was ten times more interesting than anyone else in the field. No one had ever seen anyone like him. He got interested in this in 1984, and he was pushing the idea very strongly. So I think it was a combination of by far the most influential person in the field pushing the idea very strongly, combined with the fact that there weren’t any other good ideas around, and there wasn’t anything from experiments telling us which way to go. By now you have several generations of physicists — this has been going on for more than 20 years –who have spent their whole career doing this. People don’t like to give up on something they have their lives invested in and try something else. It’s not human nature.

Interesting stuff from a guy who works in the same department as string theory advocate, Brian Greene. I’m looking forward to reading his book, Not Even Wrong : The Failure of String Theory & the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics, due to be released April 26.