Getting "not even wrong" wrong
Oops. Bob McHenry gently raised the issue of whether Einstein should be credited with the "not even wrong" phrase, as I did in my post about scientists' blogs as a resource for STS:
Alex, I think the "not even wrong" line is usually attributed to Wolfgang Pauli.
Coming from Bob, I took that to mean, "Look it up, stupid. Everybody knows this." Turns out Bob's right (not something that was really in question).
But there is, as we used to say in my old line of work, a teachable moment in the error. (Actually, full disclosure: I never used the term "teachable moment" when I was teaching, on the grounds that all moments had some kind of pedagogical potential.) A few weeks ago, the Guardian ran a piece about the phrase, and its renewed popularity:
[T]he withering comment for which he's best known combines utter contempt on the one hand with philosophical profundity on the other. "This isn't right," Pauli is supposed to have said of a student's physics paper. "It's not even wrong."
"Not even wrong" is enjoying a resurgence as the put-down of choice for questionable science: it's been used to condemn everything from string theory, via homeopathy, to intelligent design. There's a reason for this: Pauli's insult slices to the heart of what distinguishes good science from bad.
But while Pauli was famous for having said this, the documentation is pretty sketchy. Interestingly, Peter Woit himself grappled with this problem:
When I first started thinking about using “Not Even Wrong” as the title of a book, I did some research to try and find out where the supposed Pauli quote came from. No one seemed to have any information about this, other than the attribution to Pauli, and various different stories existed about the context in which he had used the phrase. I started to worry that these stories, like many of the best ones about Pauli, might be apocryphal....
Turns out that the term doesn't show up in Pauli's correspondence; it seems to be something he just used in person. Woit continues,
I contacted a few physicists who had some connection to Pauli to ask them about this. Prof. Karl von Meyenn, the editor of Pauli’s correspondence, wrote back to tell me that the phrase doesn’t occur in his correspondence. He pointed me to a biographical notice about Pauli written soon after his death by Rudolf Peierls as the best source for the story of Pauli using the phrase.
The Peierls obit relates an anecdote in which "a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘It is not even wrong.’"
Had Pauli had a blog, though, I'll bet the term would have shown up there. Of course, given my earlier post, I would think that.
Recent Comments