I consider myself a rational person, with very few negative emotions. But when something strikes me as just plain wrong, I hate it with a never ending white-hot furious passion... and frankly that amuses the hell out of my friends.

Near the top of Bex's hate list is, of course, String Theory.

I hate string theory sooooooo much. It sucks. Its crap. I simply can't believe any educated scientist buys into it. I hate it even more than social anthropologists and their incessant attempts to steal common-sense ideas and cram them into esoteric behavior models... I hate it even more than Alexander Hamilton and his sneaky Federalists... except Madison. Jamie's cool... but I digress.

Well, there's a new book out that hopefully vindicates my hatred: Not Even Wrong -- The Failure of String Theory & the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics.

The author calls String Theory a disaster for Physics. I couldn't agree more. Its a bunch of a-priori garbage. Allow me to sum up the ideas and motives behind string theory:

Hey! Lets all say the universe is made up of strings! I know we've never observed a string, and we'd need a particle accelerator the size of the galaxy to see one, but I just know in my heart I'm right!

Oh, and by the way, the universe now has 12 dimensions, and we don't know which of the 200 billion variants of string theory is correct... but at least the math is so hard that not even a supercomputer can calculate the path of a baseball!

Joy.

The phrase not even wrong was used by the brilliant Physicist Wolfgang Pauli. It was reserved for those situations where something was beyond wrong, even beyond completely wrong. Something that was not even wrong had absolutely no grain of truth to it whatsoever, and was even dangerously misleading.

I think it's correct to apply not even wrong to String Theory. I mean, its just not science. Its the brainchild of a bunch of starry-eyed dreamers who would feel better about themselves if they could cram the universe into some sort of cosmic order.

I'm sorry, this is Physics, not Philosophy. Science is dirty. And quite frankly, I'm surprised at the number of Physicists who fell for this crap. Sure, we probably have an innate desire to turn the universe into elegant formulas... but I have never once seen any evidence that says the universe should have some kind of elegant cosmic order. Why can't it be just a big ball of chaos that only occasionally makes sense?

This crap bugged me when I was getting my Physics degree in the mid 90s, and it bugs me even more today. That's the "never ending" part of my white-hot hatred.

Anyway, the harder we look at the universe the crazier it appears. Things like chaos theory, dark energy, quantum foam (great on a caffè latte), and the uncertainty principle lend plenty of evidence to this. The double-slit experiment to this day blows my mind.

My advice to Theoretical Physicists searching for a unified theory of life, the universe, and everything? Take a page from the slacker handbook: give up.

You are supposed to be scientists. You are supposed to be pragmatic. Here's what you should do:

1. Observe the world until you see something askew.
2. Poke at it with a stick until you can predict its behavior.
3. Repeat.

Sure, there will always be value in having some specialized Theoretical Physicists. But unless you actually get your hands dirty in a lab, you're going to grow more and more out of touch with the real world... and then either come up with some more crap like String Theory, or warp into a mad scientist who obsesses about sharks with frigging laser beams on their heads.

The choice is yours.