not even wrong

adj

not even wrong

adj

Etymology Generally attributed to theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

1

Derogatory Of a supposedly scientific argument or explanation: unable to be meaningfully discussed because it is based on fundamentally invalid reasoning or speculative premises that cannot be proven or falsified.

  • Your alternate name for “near monopoles” (magnets with one pole appearing much stronger than the other) is bad labwork—labwork so mesmerizingly awful that it flat out is not even wrong.1997, Electronics Now, volume 68, page 7:
  • Some physicists claim that the dominant research program, designed to overcome this situation, is not really science at all. As Peter Woit (2007) put it, it is not even wrong. If we ignore such critics of the state of physics and accept the mainstream view we are told that nature can only be understood through mathematics which now cannot be interpreted in non-mathematical language […]2016, Arran Gare, The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization, page 3:
Related terms
unfalsifiable, wrong on so many levels

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.