AUTHOR

Dr Sabine Hossenfelder, PhD, is a physicist and a scientific writer. Find out all about her and her works on her website here.

WHO IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE?

Students young and old, and all those who want to extend their knowledge of particle and astro physics will love Lost In Math. It is also a powerful tool for anyone wishing to increase their knowledge of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN).

SYNOPSIS

Dr. Hossenfelder’s compelling discourse on the subject of physics is not the usual heavily analytical, numerically driven revelation that is difficult to comprehend. Its focus is on an a selection of interviews with varied illuminated physicists. Dr. Hossenfelder then discusses the interviews and provides her opinions and views. She believes totally in the a priori method of traditional science. Yet she understands the elegant math of nature is a beautiful thing. She cautions us to guard against believing without empirical based evidentiary support.

Dr. Hossenfelder posits that the tug-of-war between the empirical (hard facts) and the esthetics nature (soft elements) creates a stress for those struggling to find unity. It is these esthetic judgements that she credits as the driver of present day research.

Dr. Hossenfelder shares her acumen and her considerable familiarity with the subject in a clear and concise manner, and without recourse to seemingly bottomless equations. Her sense of humor, whist dry gives the book a certain lightness not normally evident from such an able scientist. Her informal method aids the demystification of the subject for non-mathematicians.

The interviews are interesting and informative, but it’s Dr. Hossenfelder’s opinions that take the work to the next level. Her eloquent elucidation on the status of theories and concepts are beautifully paced and completely engaging throughout. When she does feel that a concept requires a challenge, she does so in a compassionate manner.

CONCLUSION

Lost in Math is a solid read. It is tolerable even for those who avoid mathematics like the plague. Dr. Hossenfelder takes the time to verbally guide you through each topic, and you will almost never have to fear having to face down one of those pesky equations. You will have to endure a brief mention of leptons and quarks, but they quickly pass and are replaced with a discussion on dark matter and dark energy. I found myself falling in love with the totally engaging supersymmetry (loving SUSY). Forget your calculator, just jump in and enjoy this wonderful work. I guarantee you won’t regret it.

Lost in Math was the very best read on the subject of theoretical physics that I have read in quite some time. Dr. Hossenfelder’s humor carried the day by diluting the technically advanced concepts and explanations. The interviews are generally unremarkable, however her criticism of each is a revelation.

I do wish that the book had included more and larger plates. I would also have liked footnotes. That said, I found the appendices to be extremely helpful. Although Dr. Hossenfelder attempts to explain the mathematical and scientific method relating to the subject, those unfamiliar with basic theoretical physics concepts may struggle to follow.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, NetGalley, and Basic Books for affording me the opportunity to review Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

As someone in the physics space, but not a physicist, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Hossenfelder's writing is clear, and she does an excellent job at concisely describing several of the theories (susy, etc.) that make up the concept of naturalness and beauty in physics.

I also know a number of physicists who fall prey to these ideas as well and it was an interesting read.

Hossenfelder does a good job at demystifying what for non-physicists is a strange fetish for enlarging mathematical minutiae to extrapolate, as Gogol Bordello would say, a "Super Theory of Super Everything". At the same time, her writing remains respectful of the theories she critiques.

This is a great read if you've just finished one of the great physics cosmology's out there and are looking for a little ego deflation.

I never heard of Sabine Hossenfelder until I came across this book, but now I even follow her Facebook account. She’s one hell of a writer and her dry humor and down to earth principles made this book a joy to read.

In terms of scientific facts, the book doesn’t bring anything new in the field; there hadn’t been a major discovery in physics for quite some time but the approach on today theories is unique.

The book consists mostly in a series of interviews with today’s major physicists, but her comments, beliefs and interpretations are the salt and pepper of it.

Not always an easy read, but a very enjoyable one.

This is definetely not an easy read, but it is an insightful glimpse into the current nature of physics and mathematics. Those willing to take the time to understand the concepts (presented at about a college undergrad level) will get alot out of this book.

An absolute joy of a read for those mathematical fans that also love literature. I loved reading how Hossenfelder was able to turn math into a fluid concept fit for mathematicians and those less experienced in the mathematical field. This read as a minimum college level book, but was not too dense that one could not comprehend the material. I absolutely adore mathematics and found this one that I will be referring back to often. I am a math teacher and a district math resource coach, and one of the things we often promote is theories and proofs for the math that we teach. I found this writing style fluid, smooth, and engaging for myself.

I really appreciate the insightful nature of Dr. Hossenfelder's text and how well she explains the underlying assumptions of the idea of beautiful equations and theories. In her explanations, she is always balanced in her criticisms of different pursuits while also carefully elucidating difficult components of the theories and expanding on historic ideas with the modern research and publications. One of my favorite explanations of the downfalls of considering how pleasing a theory is was the story of Einstein's work on general relativity and his eventual inclusion of the cosmological constant in order to satisfy his own beliefs and make the theory more beautiful, even when doing so overturned a significant prediction of the theory.

This is a highly scientific book and works well if you have a science background of some sort (I do, even if it is just science in school and a masters in engineering I understood quite a bit of it and was reminded of a few basic concepts)
I really enjoyed as much as I read but I was unable to read it completely.
It got too technical even for me and I tried many different ways of reading it but I still have not finished it. I might try to read it at some later stage and if I finish I will write a full length review on social media but at this time I can only publish this short note.
This is something that can start a lot of conversation and is very informative.

"So you want to know what holds the world together, how the universe was made, and what rules our existence goes by? The closest you will get to an answer is following the trail of facts down into the basement of science. Follow it until facts get sparse and your onward journey is blocked by theoreticians arguing whose theory is prettier. That's when you know you've reached the foundations."

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder isn't, as the title might suggest, a book about mathematics.
It is an intriguing portrayal of just how philosophical theoretical physics has become. How concepts like beauty, "naturalness", and simplicity are guiding physicists in their quest to explain our world, how they cling to theories that are "too good to not be true", even though they are untestable and have led to a lack of discoveries in the last three decades.
Hossenfelder points out that some of our most successful theories were, or still are regarded as "ugly" and "unnatural". She emphasizes the need for objectivity in the scientific process and calls for awareness of the cognitive biases present in each and every one of us. In her words, as scientists "we have to be aware of our own humanity - and correct our shortcomings when necessary."

The author's witty writing style and sarcastic sense of humor make this a thoroughly entertaining book without losing the gravity of the discussed themes - pun intended.

This is the best book about physics I have read in a long time.

Sabine Hossenfelder sounds the alarm as theoretical physicists begin to stray from the scientific method. As experimental results become more rare and expensive to obtain new theories have to rely on mathematics instead of physical evidence. Some have suggested that experiment is not even necessary in order to prove the worth of a theory. Through a series of fascinating interviews with working theoretical physicists the author summarizes the current state of several fields of theoretical physics. By the end she explains how the culture of academia as well as natural human biases could be causing scientists to squander time, money, and perhaps the credibility of science as a whole in what could ultimately be an fruitless pursuit. The recommendation is to not abandon the scientific method and to try to eliminate bias as much as possible in order to successfuly identify fruitful areas of research.

As a physicist I enjoyed the book very much and believe it could be useful to any scientist. The author's writing style was also very refreshing and accessible.

“Lost in Math” tackles the topic announced in the subtitle: how enchanted by orderly and beautiful math, physicists stray further away from hypotheses testable in (or even descriptive of) the real world. With experiments in modern physics becoming more and more long-term and expensive, it is harder than ever for physicists to find the right paths of exploration. One “solution" that is employed (and that has been present in physics historically) is reliance on mathematical beauty as a theory assessment criterion. The issue of beauty is central to the book, but Hossenfelder also talks about the new fad of “non-empirical theory assessment”, cognitive biases and scientists’ ignorance of them, increasing specialization, issues of popularity, funding and employment in physics and how they all influence what theories are explored and how much progress is made.
A significant portion of the book is the author’s interviews with various personalities in the field who hold an array of views and focus on different areas and theories. She tries to gauge their specific attitudes towards non-empirical theory assessment and beauty as a criterion in physics. Some of them are more interesting to read than others, and though series of dialogues is not my favorite format for a book, I can see how it makes sense for the subject matter.
In general, the book clearly presents the author’s argument and almost succeeds in providing a broad overview of attitudes in the field of physics. I was put off by the mangled foray into how similar issues may manifest in other disciplines, when Hossenfelder touches on how economics suffers from stifling reliance on conventional dogmas in last chapter (do it comprehensively or not at all!) and her periodic descriptions of her checking her email and digging through her backpack, but not significantly enough to dislike the book.
Overall, an interesting and worthy read.

Sabine Hossenfelder dares to ask difficult question about the state of science today, and she examines the forces that drive the current research. A thoughtprovoking and important book for everybody who is interested in science in general, and theoretical physics in particular.

I can’t say for sure that I understood everything in this book, since my knowledge of physics in general is very patchy, but overall, I liked its tone, and its global idea, because I can get why one would be easily led astray by theories that look ‘beautiful’. It’s something that I feel is very human, after all, as we often look for a form of harmony in the world surrounding us, if only to try and make sense of it. Perhaps the fundamental, underlying laws of nature don’t make that much sense, or don’t always look like they do, and so we try to understand them in ways that would reconcile us with an apparent lack of… meaning, maybe? But what if the theories we pursue, albeit ‘pretty’ and nicely wrapped, turn out to be wrong? Shall we keep pursuing those, in the hopes that we just haven’t seen proof yet due to technological limitations, for instance? It seems that the answer to this isn’t so clear-cut. (The LHC being a good example. I’m tremendously excited by the LHC, and what it allowed to prove so far… but while we got the Higgs boson, we still haven’t gotten supersymmetry.)

The book also gave me pointers about things of which I clearly don’t know enough, especially in order to understand where the author comes from, so I know I’ll have to focus on those at some point in order to learn more.

As a side note, I don’t know, but I don’t feel particularly bothered by the ‘ugliness’ of the Standard Model. It may be in part because all I know about it, I learnt on my own, without following the regular cursus, so I never approached it with any specific idea in mind? We’ll see once I’ve studied more.

Conclusion: Definitely interesting, although don’t approach it if you know next to nothing to physics, since some ideas won’t make sense otherwise.

Lost in Math is the story of how aesthetic judgement drives contemporary research; how theoretical physicists produce ideas that are "highly controversial and yet exceedingly popular, speculative yet intriguing, pretty yet useless"; and how these theories are untestable but the physicist believes them to be too good not to be true.

In the past, scientists observed the world around them and performed experiments. Then they developed theories to explain these observations. These theories would then be tested against addition observations and experiments. These days, theoretical physicists (especially in particle physics) concoct theories that are only supported by beautiful mathematics, and which can never be confirmed by experiments or which are unlikely (due to cost and difficulty) to be examined experminentally.

In an effort to find out what went wrong with theoretical physics, Hossenfelder interviews several physicists and takes a look at the current popular physics theories. The author makes a convincing case that this reliance on the beauty/maths-only criteria to determine which theories to study and promote has resulted in a lack of progress in certain physics fields. In the author's own words, "in the end the only way to find out which theory is correct is to check whether it describes nature; non-empirical theory assessment will not do it".

The writing style of this book is conversational and accessible (for the most part - just pretend the physics is Star Trek physics), and the topic covered is important not only for physicists. I did find the physics explanations somewhat baffling but then most of the physicists interviewed state that no-one understands quantum physic. However, this book is a book about how physicists work, not about the physics itself, so it didn't matter much. I found this book to be interesting and informative.

Is truth beauty and beauty, truth? It can be hard to tell.

In Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Sabine Hossenfelder argues that these two concepts are not equivalent. As the subtitle implies, Hossenfelder feels that theoretical physicists are too obsessed with creating “beautiful” theories, in the sense that the mathematics that underpins the theories (because these days, theories are basically math, even though, as Hossenfelder stresses, physics isn’t math) must be beautiful and use “natural” numbers (by which she means numbers close to 1). Theories that don’t conform to these criteria tend to be unpopular, to receive less funding for experiments and less attention in papers. This, Hossenfelder contends, is a mistake. She fears it reinforces an orthodoxy that threatens theoretical physics with stagnation and, worse, undermines the scientific method. In her view, since theoretical physics is often regarded as the “hardest” of hard sciences, if faith in the foundations of physics goes, so too goes trust in science—right when we need it more than ever.

I guess this book kind of hits the sweet spot for me, because I’m big into the intersections of philosophy and mathematics and science. Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for the free eARC!

I love thinking about the limits not just of what we know but also what is knowable. This, to me, is why theoretical physics fascinates me—not just because it explains the foundations of our physical existence, but because it knocks up against literally the limits of our ability to measure and quantify. Each time we want to go looking for heavier and heavier particles, for example, we need bigger and bigger particle accelerators. That’s why we built the LHC, which—in Hossenfelder’s opinion—has been a bit of a bust in terms of new physics. But we’re running up against the limits of what we can do on Earth, or even in orbit … what’s next? Particle accelerators the size of our solar system? I get chills.

Lost in Math is not really about physics in the popular science sense. This is more accurately a philosophy book. Hossenfelder discusses a lot of physics concepts (most of which, to be honest, go way over my head), but ultimately she is more interested in looking at why her colleagues in theoretical physics chase the theories that they do. Unlike some of them, she confesses that she doesn’t seem to have a nose for beauty, that she doesn’t recognize a beautiful theory when she sees it—and she is uneasy about this reliance on ideas of beauty.

So while the book follows the fairly standard approach in popular science texts of doing a brief overview of the history of physics, Hossenfelder is looking at the philosophies that were at work rather than the merits of the actual theories. As familiar names—Bohr and Einstein and Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Dirac et al—move across the page, we learn more about their thinking—insofar as we can know it—than their specific contributions. Hossenfelder isn’t looking to teach physics here. She’s asking us to think critically about why we have the physics we do.

I think this is a really interesting and important point. To laypeople, like myself, it might seem inevitable that we’ve ended up here. After all, there is only one true science, right? We might have made a bunch of false starts, but along the way, as we uncover more and more “facts” and tinker with our theories and run better experiments, we’re narrowing it down and getting closer to “the truth”, right?

Well … it’s complicated. As Hossenfelder explains, it isn’t so much that the physics we have now is The One True Physics as it is Something That Mostly Works. And in the case of quantum physics, there are actually a whole bunch of competing interpretations that explain the same phenomena, just differently, and at the moment they all tend to be valid because no one has figured out a way to test between them. So as much as both philosophers and physicists would like the other camp to stay out of their business, when you get right down to it, the two are entwined at the moment.

Hossenfelder tours the landscape of theoretical physics, interviewing researchers in different fields to help her understand the obsession with naturalness and beauty. Along the way, you will pick up on her clear sense of exasperation with what’s happening in her profession. It isn’t just the naturalness argument: it’s the whole system, the fighting over short-term grants and positions, the tendency to reward people who publish more often, on more accepted topics, over people who spend their time tinkering with more heterodox approaches. And maybe how surprised I am by Hossenfelder’s tone and voice, or even the fact that this book got written, further supports this idea, since we are so used to “gee whiz” pop physics books that emphasize the beauty of the universe and of the theories that explain it. Physicists who write books for popular consumption are generally trying to build a following, and I get the impression Hossenfelder really doesn’t care about that. While I find Hossenfelder’s writing, in general, to be mediocre, her forthright and honest tone is refreshing and interesting.

There’s a fair bit of mathematical concepts in this book too. That probably shouldn’t be surprising, given its title. There aren’t actual equations, but Hossenfelder throws around terms like “groups” fairly generously without really going into what they are (and maybe that’s for the best). As with the physics shop talk, if you don’t have much of a grounding in abstract algebra, you’re going to feel a little out of the loop. This is not a light read. It is, however, enjoyable in the sense that it tickles the part of your brain that really wants to think hard about things.

Lost in Math succeeds, largely, in what it sets out to do. It demonstrates that certain elements of how theoretical physicists theorize right now aren’t the most conducive or productive. It pulls back the curtain for a wider audience, exposing us to some of the philosophical debates and issues that have long been happening within the physics community, which laypeople might wrongly perceive as monolithic in approach, if not in interpretations. Hossenfelder’s writing is a little dry, and the book is full of challenging concepts … but I think it’s worth a try if you want some philosophy in with your science.

Creative Commons BY-NC License

Loved the philosophy of science; got lost in the physics

I enjoyed this book. I confess that I got lost in all the physics but it didn't really matter. I loved Sabine Hossenfelder’s discussions about the philosophy of science, her descriptions of interviews with other physicists, her travails as a scientist, and her keen sense of humor and, at times, biting sarcasm. I recommend it for people interested in the philosophy of science.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.

One thought experiment that I love is the Theseus Paradox, which asks the question that if a ship is repaired and all of its old parts replaced, is it the same ship that was originally built or a new one? When looking at modern theoretical physics, I start to wonder if we’re approaching a similar paradox where physics has been replaced by math and philosophy. In Lost in Math, Sabine Hossenfelder seeks to answer a similar question. Her contention is that desire for a beautiful theorem has become too much of a distraction for theoretical physics. Lost in Math journals her investigation.

TL;DR

Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder is an important investigation into the current biases shared across the theoretical physics discipline. It asks hard questions about the current orthodoxy. Highly recommended.

The State of Theoretical Physics

Ms. Hossenfelder quite clearly lays out the state of theoretical physics, and she approaches the field as a contrarian. In my idealized view of any science, I see the practitioners as deeply skeptical of the status quo. Else how do we surpass our current knowledge? But Ms. Hossenfelder paints a different picture, one in which questioning the mainstream is increasingly difficult.In Lost in Math, she focuses on the failure to find supersymmetric particles to explore whether we’re looking at the wrong theory, simply because symmetry is beautiful. She investigates this through many interviews with working and prominent physicists. Her journey showed a variation of opinion but a united optimism that the scientific method will prevail. It’s encouraging to see that despite the lack of results, the physicists maintain their excitement and passion for their field. But passion isn’t enough when the experimental results are missing. Ms. Hossenfelder continues to hammer home the point that despite bigger and bigger particle colliders, the supersymmetric particles still elude us.

In the course of her investigation, we see that she’s at odds with the mainstream physics community. In this book, she lays out many reasons for why this is so, and I appreciated that she presents a complex picture. Because, like many things in life, no one prime mover exists that we can point to and say, “fix that to make everything better.” But in addition to shining the spotlight on what she believes to be the problem, Ms. Hossenfelder lists potential solutions. These solutions are the appendix, which, at first, I didn’t like. It seemed too safe to exclude them from the text, but upon reflection, I think it was the correct move to place them in the appendix. Instead of highlighting her solutions, Ms. Hossenfelder showcased the problem, which allows room for solutions other than just her own. Though, I recommend serious consideration of her solutions.

The most technical argument in the book pits natural versus fine-tuning. It’s an interesting discussion that takes a bit to understand, but I think Ms. Hossenfelder explains it well. It’s challenging without reaching too far.

Writing

This text is a curious mixture of physics lessons, interviews, and travel journal. Sabine writes in an academic style that at times slips into deep philosophical prose. While most of the book was accessible for me, often I had to reread and think hard about the concepts in the text. The challenging parts are important in a book like this. The reader needs to think deeply about the topics and where physics goes from here. But these parts are interspersed enough to give the book a sense of pacing. Lost in Math wasn’t a dull, dry lecture; it’s a story of the current state of physics that ebbs and flows. I think it’s very well done and will be looking for more of Ms. Hossenfelder’s work.

In addition to the physics lessons, this book reads as a person questioning if they’re still in love with their profession. One of the important but rarely discussed differences between college and the workforce is what the work actually entails. The things I loved about studying engineering make up less than half of what I do at my job. What we study and love is just a small part of work, and I wonder if this book is born of Ms. Hossenfelder’s disappointment in that regard. By the close of the book, we see that its her love of physics that clashes with the current orthodoxy. The contrarian occupies a difficult place in a society, especially when pointing out needed improvements. So, is it that Ms. Hossenfelder is questioning her career choice, or does she feel the fatigue of pointing out that the emperor has no clothes? I hope it’s the latter and that she continues to provide a reality check to theoretical physics if not to spur on needed changes.

Physics (My Personal Opinion)

No one would accuse me of being without an opinion, and I try to keep them out of my reviews. BUT around this book gathered many questions that I’ve had over the years about physics. To be clear, I love physics. I read a lot about the field and came close to making it my career path. But ultimately I chose engineering for a number of reasons, high among them the need to see a testable product. Over the years of reading about string theory, the standard model, the multi-verse, I’ve fallen in love with these elegant ideas, but a small tickle always accompanied my studies. How do they know these advanced theories are correct? That is the question that drove Lost in Math and that drove me to engineering. Traditionally, the answer to that question has been an experimental correlation. Theory and experiment twist round each other like the double helix of a DNA strand. But increasingly, physics has branched out into areas currently beyond our experimental capabilities. So, the question becomes how do they know?

But at some point we have to say that we don’t know. There is nothing wrong with this, though. Being able to say I don’t know is an essential part of the scientific method, but it isn’t as sexy as talking about the multi-verse or a reality made from music. One day, it may be possible to conduct experiments into the information loss paradox at blackhole event horizons. One day, we might be able to glimpse into the multi-verse to view inflationary bubbles where everything is made of anti-matter. But until then we must be careful to differentiate between what we believe and what we’ve observed. This is even more true when put in context of the anti-science right here in America. These people condemn the word theory when applied to evolution, and it’s hard to explain that theory doesn’t just mean guess. And when theory is all mathematical, it’s even more difficult.

Conclusion

Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math is a call to action for physics to take a good hard look at itself. It’s a necessary work that will irritate people, which is ultimately the role of a contrarian who loves a subject. Ms. Hossenfelder’s attempts to pull physics back from the borders of pure math and philosophy is admirable. As an anchor to the current realities of the field, this is a must have book for anyone exploring cutting edge theoretical physics.

8 out of 10!

A good attempt to explain the beauty of Standard Model and the state of the art of particle physics, keeping it simple, but not too simple, as Einstein himself proposed. I particularly liked the Appendix "What you can do to help", because I stronlgy think there is nothing like a passive learner.
I didn't liked too much the "In brief" section at the end of each chapter, that ruined the discussion with the triviality of the bullet points

The universe is unacceptable to physicists

Well back into history, Man has tried to force nature into symmetry. Some of our greatest scientists spent their lives trying to force the solar system and then the universe into spheres, cubes, cones and cylinders. Or to find superpartners for every particle so they fit the (newish) theory of supersymmetry. That it has never worked has deterred no one, it seems.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist whose very job it is to create new theories (and let mathematicians sweat the details). She has admitted defeat. Her book, Lost in Math, is all about the blizzard of theories we all hear about. They have not only remained unproven, they are often unprovable. She quotes colleagues who admit “It is not an exaggeration to say that most of the world’s particle physicists believe that supersymmetry must be true,” because it so elegant and easy to work with. And despite the facts.

Hossenfelder says she got into physics because she couldn’t understand people. Physics made sense; people were indecipherable. With no little irony, she wonders if she should get out of physics, because she can’t understand the people. This is a great basis for a book, and Hossenfelder pulls it off with humor, charm, and almost no resorting to math. It makes for a fabulous tale, as she travels the world to meet with the who’s who of physics. She records their near-unanimous dissatisfaction with their field, both because it is not proving beauty wins over ugly, and because ironically, no progress is being made. The book quickly becomes totally informed irreverence from an insider.

Physicists have problems with large numbers. First, they can’t justify or even explain them. Second, when you take the inverse of a large number, it is uncomfortably small, which they also can’t justify or explain. The latest disappointment was the long awaited discovery of the Higgs boson, which seems to have disappointed everyone with its ungainly mass. Physicists like numbers to be as close to 1 as possible. They call those numbers “natural” and they lend themselves to pretty theories and formulas. But the universe repeatedly refuses to co-operate in this matter. With all the components and predictions of the current standard model, a total of one qualifies as natural. Everything else is classified as “fine tuning.” Whole theories that utterly fail claim to have discovered “interesting boundaries.” And all with a straight face.

The later 20th century found physicists chasing three principles: symmetry, unification, and naturalness. These guiding lights have led them far astray. They have invented numerous unproven theories that are far more elegant than what they observe in nature. They are so elegant, physicists insist that nature must employ them, and their quest becomes to prove nature has done so, not whether or not it is valid. Beauty, Hossenfelder says, is a treacherous guide.

In 2018, there remains absolutely no evidence for:
-extra dimensions beyond visible 3D and time
-new elementary particles beyond the 25 fundamental particles known since the 1960s
- vortex theory
-string theory
-multiverse. Even Stephen Hawking got into it. His posthumously published (second to last) paper explores the beauty of multiverses, though no one has ever been able to demonstrate their existence or influence. Or need, other than for mathematical beauty.

Hossenfelder finds some of it comes from sheer boredom. The multibillion dollar Large Hadron Collider has given physicists no new particles or proven any new theories. Physicists are used to rapid advances, dozens yearly, and everyone getting a Nobel Prize sooner than later (most often by age 30 in the 20th century). In the absence of concrete advances, they are trying to fit a cube into a round hole. Or as one string theorist put it – physicists are using a map of the Alps to travel the Himalayas.

It has come to the point where anything that isn’t natural and elegant can simply be assigned to another universe, and the job is done. Hossenfelder interviewed one renowned physics professor who complains that physicists now insist their theories need no proof at all, that they should simply be accepted as true, and developed from there. This is precisely why Hossenfelder got into physics; she couldn’t understand people like this. The professor agrees; he is baffled and worried about the whole field.

One of the many nice things about Hossenfelder’s style is that she doesn’t begin with 50 pages of dreary history and instruction. She gets right to the issue and only then backpedals into origins. She advises that readers can skip this if they know it. But that would be a mistake. She writes so smartly and her perspective is so untainted by the usual academic constraints, it’s even a pleasure to read the history.

She tries to explain the bias that physicists exhibit. But she can’t get past the fact it is about aesthetics and not science. Everyone she speaks with is in favor of it. They admit the pretty theory gains automatic acceptance, while the complicated answer founders. She fears this is precisely why theoretical physics has made no advances in decades. And why she thinks she might be better off leaving it.

Truth be told, many of the sciences foster these same viruses. Biology says it is in crisis. I reviewed the excellent Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans deWaal, in which he comes down hard on social scientists for their totally prejudiced studies unconsciously designed to prove animals don’t measure up to Man. They are basically all invalid, and Hossenfelder thinks the same thing is going on in theoretical physics.

Douglas Adams said that in the whole history of written English, you will never find the combination of words: “as pretty as an airport”. Here’s another I never thought I’d see: a fun theoretical physics book.

David Wineberg


@astrokatie

I was intrigued by this book from the start. Being a physics and math nerd, the author had me. It was curious to me. Her thesis is that science, particularly particle physics theory, has been led astray by a non-scientific pursuit of the aesthetic quality of theories "beauty." It has been very common for me to hear and for me to say regarding some of the math of theories that have been proven that the math is beautiful. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism are beautiful. Four "simple" equations that explain all of the electromagnetics is beautiful in my mind. Have I been led astray by this principle of beauty?
Dr. Hossenfelder interviews numerous scientists in her field and outside her area to see if this approach has hijacked science from is experimental roots. As an experimental physicist, I found the book very enjoyable and a little disturbing. Have we been led astray? Have we left the truth of scientific research for a group think pursuit of beauty?

This was a great book, and one I hope that many people (particularly within physics) choose to read. It's not the most uplifting book, but that's the point. I'm a student within physics, and I'm happy that someone is at least shedding some light on the less appealing aspects of physics at this time. It's great to be hopeful, but if everyone is sharing the same mass delusion about supersymmetry and beauty when there is no experimental evidence for it, that's not so good.

I particularly like the fact that the author brings up the fact of a probability distribution. If one doesn't have a probability distribution, you cannot quantify how "improbable" it is for two numbers to cancel out so well (fine-tuning). It's just not possible. Yet, it seems like physicists are doing this over and over again, without recognizing they are choosing a probability distribution arbitrarily.

The author's views on beauty within physics is also nice to hear. It's fine to say that beauty has been an okay guide in the past, but there's no reason for us to think it's the only guide, or needs to be correct. This has implications, since it affects what kind of experiments are funded (to a certain extent). As such, it's important to acknowledge that we are enchanted by beauty, and this isn't a mathematical necessity.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. I already follow the author's blog, Backreaction, and it's great as well. Read this book. It's important.