The Trouble with Physics: the Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, by Lee Smolin, a leading particle physicist and proponent of an increasingly favored alternative approach to the unification of gravity and quantum field theory. Basically, his book is a second indictment, along with Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, of string theory's lack of predictive content, and the sociological distortions in the field which basically entail that young physicists, in order to have any chance of success, have to sign up to work in a theory which posits at least 10^(500)—that's right, a google raised to the fifth power—of distinct vacuum states (each corresponding to a distinct way the universe could be), with no possible way to sort amongst them, and where, moreover, even the most ardent defenders of the 'theory' admit that they cannot really say what its content is, or how it could possibly be tested (in crashing contrast with the Standard Model of quantum field theory). Since my own field of syntactic theory is in exactly the same condition (even unto a kind of parallel between Noam Chomsky and Ed Witten, except that EW appears to be vasly more intellectually honest than NC), and since physics was my major until I switched late to linguistics, I'm really fascinated and way, way dismayed to read that the toxic conditions in my own field are so closely paralleled in what I've always regarded as the paradigm of scienctific method and success...