Lost in Math
How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
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Lost in Math
Buy Now for £18.99
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Narrated by:
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Laura Jennings
About this listen
A contrarian argues that modern physicists' obsession with beauty has given us wonderful math but bad science
Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these "too good to not be true" theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.
©2018 Sabine Hossenfelder (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Sabine Hossenfelder is a working physicist, prepared to blow the whistle on the chronic lack of progress for the past 50 years: the failure of the LHC to find any evidence of Supersymmetry, the lack of progress in String Theory, the failure to identify Dark Matter, resolve the contradictions between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity or develop a fundamental explanation beyond the Standard Model. Meanwhile, physicists continue to churn out untestable hypotheses and hypothetical new particles with curious names. Why? The attraction to beautiful theories, and elegant maths is seductive, but may be misleading us... Beauty may not necessarily be “Truth”, but may, like music, be culturally inculcated ie. in the eye of the beholder. Hossenfelder raises the alarm that we may be drifting towards ‘post empirical science’ where rather than being led by empirical discovery, a theory’s “beauty” defined as simplicity, naturalness and elegance become the dominant criteria used to decide where to invest in research. We may be looking in the wrong places.
Throughout the book, ideas and explanations are interwoven with sometimes confrontational interviews with the likes of Stephen Weinberg (who abruptly walks out on her), Frank Wilczek, George F.R. Ellis, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Joe Polchinski among others. She asks intriguing questions such as how, in a Multiverse of all possibilities, we can know which phenomena demand explanation, and what are just brute fact. Do we need a meta theory to determine the probabilities? Naturalness confounds simplicity.
This is an important book. If you are interested in Physics, and have a fair understanding of M-Theory, SUSY, QM, Relativity and the Standard Model, you should find it interesting, even if you disagree. It is narrated clearly and enjoyably. “Lost in Math” feels like the realisation of Horgan’s “The End of Science” at a time when Science, and especially Physics has never been more popular, or more widely perceived as successful.
Exciting, Challenging and Controversial.
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A fearless and needed remedy
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