Knotty problem

Lee Smolin ("With string, science has tied itself in knots", August 10) takes issue with the "scientists" who have "never read a book or a paper in their speciality written earlier than ten years before they entered graduate school".

May I take the liberty to recommend to him The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, following his assertion that all swans are white (a cod demonstration of falsifiability)?

Smolin expounds reflective practice, but I am inclined to wonder if he thinks that he has cornered that particular market.

String theory may not have delivered the goods, but then neither have any of the other attempts at unification of the fundamental forces of nature.

Gordon Joly

London