Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist who has very much to say about very large problems with theoretical physics and modern science itself. The problems she reveals are that much of what theoretical physics claims are laws of nature, are really wild speculations based on beautiful math and theory without any evidence. Her book claims there are well funded enclaves of researchers who spend decades writing papers based on previous writings of past like minded researchers from the same academic tribe. Hossenfelder freely admits to being 'one of the tribe" and this carries weight in her book. One prime example of such an enclave, are the String Theory researchers who have vast mathematical works supporting a decades old idea with not a shred of data to show it is real. There many more speculations which pass for reality such as multiple universes, super symmetry and changing amounts of dimensions which all have their tribal academic circles who produce papers for decades on the same ideas that remain unobserved. Indeed, from my personal experience of reading popular science books by physics professionals such as Brian Greene and Lisa Randall, I have been exposed to all these speculations, which are portrayed by them as fact. IT is now unsettling to realize I have been led astray by illusions posing as proven science. Hossenfelder's book has made me totally reassess what I had read in Greene and Randalls' books. The book is very hard hitting on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. It is portrayed as a multimillion dollar machine which has shown no evidence for many of the speculative particle theories,( excepting the Higgs particle which was expected to appear anyway),and as the years pass it is becoming a huge embarrassment. Yet, no one would pull the plug on the LHC because of the sunken costs of it and that it provides employment for physics professionals to write more and more papers. Hossenfelder uses an interesting technique of interviewing various physics researchers who advocate for many of these unproven theories and commenting on them afterwards. Her commentary is insightful and indeed humorous at times. There are some complex physics explanations which are useful for giving an insight into the rabbit holes that physics researchers go down and indeed never come out of. The book is not totally critical in perspective but offers many ideas of how to correct the problems she brings up. Perhaps, her biggest warning for me is that we live in a time of anti-science, religious fundamentalism and anti-reason and the last thing we need are scientists spending decades creating self defined beautiful mathematical dream scenarios which no evidence that such ideas have any shred of being real and perhaps never will. As long as research funding comes in, all is well. The huge problem is that scientists are chasing visions while ignoring the purpose of science which is to show actual evidence about how the material world works . How can scientific reason oppose other worldly illusions while it creates its own? This book is important because reason and critical thinking can fade away if the professional class who use reason end up in the same mystical world as the opponents of reason. Read this book.

This is a brilliant book that is engaging, witty, and whose physics is not only fully credible, but powerfully presented. The author is a brave person for taking on the physics establishment by telling them their approach to the failures to move physics beyond the Standard Model needs to be faced more forthrightly than the field seems willing to do. One of her more interesting "hooks" into this subject is to not so gently mock them in their vaunted "search for beauty" in their mathematics. She really nails them on this, showing how totally irrational and vulnerable they are to emotion when approaching problems for which there is no data, but only math. She is strongly foretelling that physics is in a crisis, and one with really no immediate hope of relief. She does this a little awkwardly, as she really wants to stay part of the team, and you can't be part of the team if you are willing to admit defeat re the quest for "beyond the standard model". It will probably take the next generation of accelerator, probably built in China, to finally convince everyone, including the big funders of things like these accelerators, that the Standard Model is it, and we're likely never to go beyond it. Dr. Hossenfelder is probably the canary in the mineshaft on this issue, although I'd much prefer she end up being the hero leading the other miners out of the mine before it caves in.

This is a good book that makes you smarter. Sabine writes in a clear, limpid style that makes an inherently very difficult subject not easy, that can’t be done, but makes it possible for us to apprehend the magnitude of the problem. We tend to think that classical physics is easy and accessible to simple observations, but it took real geniuses, a Kepler, a Newton, a Leibnitz, etc to outline it. A little more than a century ago this classical understanding was surpassed by more powerful explanations. The ideas of Einstein, Planck, Pauli, Heisenberg, et al, gave us unprecedented power and understanding. These ideas were expressed in mathematical language. At this time the ideas of the twentieth century have run into roadblocks, and we observe more and more things that require ad hoc explanations such as dark matter and dark energy, and simultaneously fail to observe things that current thoughts predict like quantum gravity and super symmetry. The mathematics have become self-referential. This book clarifies the problems that our current ideas do not answer and does it in a clear engaging manner.I am conscious that I may have failed to understand parts of this story. The blame for this goes to my shortcomings. Ms. Hossenfelder does a great job.

Eu gosto do estilo da Sabine..estou lendo e acho que das fontes de informação que estão acontecendo na física moderna e os pontos de destaque nas teorias de um modo geral, é de grande importância para quem quer explorar melhor esses temas.

Muy, muy divertido. Es el viaje de una física en su intento de dar sentido a su carrera. Muchas entrevistas con algunos de los físicos más relevantes del panorama y no me refiero a divulgadores. Hay gente que no disfruta de los sarcasmos y las ironías, si es así, ni os acerquéis a este. Para mí es como el aderezo perfecto para la obra.

I love reading this book. Sabine is smart, funny, and hard-headed. The book is a delight to read.Very intelligent, very clear and simple to grasp and follow. Sabine knows how to introduce complex ideas through simple analogies. So ok, she's a scientist and has limited patience for speculative nonsense, but she's subtle and funny enough to make it work. I believe I am one of those theorists she would disdain, and even so - I loved her voice and her book.PSSomething is rotten in the LHC... ;-)

Geen "maths" in dit boek om in te verdwalen. Wel een sterk overzicht van de vooruitgang van en bestaande theorieën in fysica. En een kritische blik op de koers die binnen de wetenschap wordt gevolgd. Hossenfelder schrijft leuk, open en intelligent. In dit boek beschrijft ze ook gesprekken die ze met vooraanstaande fysici heeft gehad over het onderwerp

Me parece un libro sumamente interesante y recomendable, aunque para apreciar mejor su contenido es preferible tener conocimientos de física. El libro presenta en una manera extraordinariamente clara la historia y los detalles sobre varias de las áreas de la física teórica actual (por ejemplo, la mecánica cuántica, la teoría de cuerdas, y la cosmología). El tema central del libro es la crítica a las ideas que están detrás de mucha de la investigación en la física teórica en las últimas décadas, a falta de resultados experimentales que den una guía.