By Peter Weiss
Jazz musician Ken Hatfield entitled his compact disc released in June String Theory. A quilt-maker, Denyse Schmidt, offers quilts with the same title in two color schemes. Elizabeth Dewberry’s novel His Lovely Wife (2006, Harcourt), about a woman married to a Nobel laureate physicist, “uses string theory to weave together two women’s lives,” the publisher’s note says. The abstruse theory asserting that infinitesimal strings of energy make up the most fundamental constituents of the universe is flourishing as an icon of scientific brilliance.
Much of the theory’s mainstream popularity stems from glowing presentations of it that have been aimed at general audiences: For instance, Columbia University string theorist Brian R. Greene’s The Elegant Universe (1999, W.W. Norton) and his 2003 television special based on the book. Last month, however, two new general-audience books came out—one by a mathematician with a Ph.D. degree in theoretical particle physics and the other by a physicist who sometimes works in string theory—that cast string theory in a dramatically unflattering light.