Knowledge only progresses, he argued, when falsifiable claims about the world get proven wrong. But hypotheses that can't even be wrong, Popper maintained, can't tell you anything. Hypotheses that might be wrong are the lifeblood of science: you test them, find evidence to support or undermine them, and learn something in the process. "I use 'not even wrong' to refer to things that are so speculative that there would be no way ever to know whether they're right or wrong," says Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University who runs the weblog Not Even Wrong ( This is the principle of falsifiability, famously associated with the philosopher Karl Popper. There's a reason for this: Pauli's insult slices to the heart of what distinguishes good science from bad.
"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.
"This isn't right," Pauli is supposed to have said of a student's physics paper. But the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) is in a category of his own: the withering comment for which he's best known combines utter contempt on the one hand with philosophical profundity on the other. I t is comforting that the finest minds in science are as prone as the rest of us to bitching.
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