Not Even Wrong

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Shared by the wonderful Stormierbones...

From The Dean of Debunking, a book review:

But is string theory true? Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University, has challenged the entire string-theory discipline by proclaiming that its topic is not a genuine theory at all and that many of its exponents do not understand the complex mathematics it employs. String theory, he avers, has become a form of science fiction. Hence his book's title, Not Even Wrong: an epithet created by Wolfgang Pauli, an irascible early 20th-century German physicist. Pauli had three escalating levels of insult for colleagues he deemed to be talking nonsense: "Wrong!", "Completely wrong!" and finally "Not even wrong!". By which he meant that a proposal was so completely outside the scientific ballpark as not to merit the least consideration.

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"Not even wrong" is one of my favorite math phrases ever. To also include "it should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that this is true", a phrase my calculus professor trotted out as a joke during difficult proofs.

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