User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist, and she's pretty mad about the way her subject has gone over the last thirty years. She's written this book to tell you why she's mad, and what she's done to try and find out what went wrong. She's talked with a bunch of people, some of them major stars of the physics world. She's asked them questions and she reports their answers. Somehow, even though a fair amount of it is near-incomprehensible physics-speak, she makes it cool and funny. She's got a great voice, laid back and detached and deadpan. She reminds me a little bit of Jessica Chastain in
Molly's Game. Jessica's talking about poker and Sabine's talking about physics, but the two subjects aren't as far apart as you first think. When you come down to it, they're both high-stakes gambling games.
Physics is on a losing streak. It went all-in with the Large Hadron Collider and bet fifteen billion dollars that it would find supersymmetric particles. (The Higgs was just the consolation prize; Sabine says that was pretty much a given). Most of the experts thought the supersymmetric particles were there, but they didn't show up. Physics tossed in a few billion more to upgrade the LHC to higher energies, and there were still no supersymmetric particles. Now it's sitting hunched over its cards as dawn begins to break, wondering what it's going to say to its wife.
The problem is that the stakes have gotten so high that the physics gambling syndicate can only afford to play a few hands. Most of the time, it has to fold. It needs to be very careful about the hands it does choose to play, the ideas that involve setting up a real experiment. They have an army of experts, the theoreticians, whose job it is to give them advice on which experiments might be worthwhile; Sabine is one of those experts. It's a frustrating life. Usually, you know you're developing an idea which will never be tested. In practice, the theoreticians now present their work mostly to each other. They judge it by aesthetic standards, and fashion also plays a large role. Fundamental physics has entered a decadent period.
The theoreticians deny that anything is wrong. Mathematical beauty is very important, they say. It's our only real guide to what distinguishes a promising theory from an unpromising one. Supersymmetry was so beautiful that it had to be true; Nature has so far refused to agree, but maybe they just need to build a larger collider. In contrast, the Standard Model, which is universally agreed to be hideously ugly, irritates the hell out of everyone by passing all the experimental tests they can throw at it. It is in fact rather confusing when you write it down.
Sabine is suspicious about the cult of beauty. She upsets theoreticians when she suggests that it might not be scientific to work this way. She points out that many ideas now considered brilliant and beautiful were called monstrosities when they first appeared. (Quantum mechanics was a bit of an ugly duckling). She thinks scientists should read more philosophy and sociology, and try to understand their real motivations. In case you're in any doubt, she gives plenty of details about just what isn't working. She tells you where the bodies are buried, with little sketch maps and instructions on how deep to dig. She says people tried to talk her out of writing
Lost in Math, and that now she'll never get tenure.
It's pretty interesting to see someone telling the truth, and you realise how seldom that happens. I just couldn't put this book down.
Rating: really liked it
I have no way to judge Dr. Hossenfelder’s qualifications as a theoretical physicist, but I can say up front, she’s one hell of a writer.
I have a bunch of notes, but you know what? If you just want a straight review, go to Steven Woit’s, linked below. Theoretical physicists are supposed to come up with stuff that can be tested by experiment. If you can’t test the idea, or if it flunks the test, you move on (see Feynman). Physicists have been working away for *30 years* to try to improve the Standard Model. Basically, no recent progress. This should be a hint to the physics community. Instead, they’ve doubled down on untestable stuff like String Theory, that, to some physicists’ eyes, is beautiful.
But: “Who gives a fuck what you like or dislike? Nature doesn’t care”— this is hotshot physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Ar... , in a pungent interview with the author. Unlike the author, he’s a tenured physicist at Princeton, and says he’s found his dream job.
My outsider thoughts: just about all the physicists Hossenfelder talked to *hate* the Standard Model, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standar..., mostly because it’s “ugly”, and incomplete. Well, so what? It *works* -- and if it ain’t broke, why fix it? It’s not like there isn’t plenty of other cool stuff for physicists to work on. Such as, current physics only accounts for maybe 5% of the known universe. Dark Energy (68%) and Dark Matter (27%) supposedly are the rest, and we have NO CLUE what they are made of! C’mon, girls and boys, Nobel Prizes await you….
Hossenfelder has written a breezy catch-up text for modern physics, well suited for people like me, whose formal exposure to physics ended decades ago. And I can *almost* understand most of the stuff she’s talking about. This is a Big Deal, and very rare in popular science books. So, read it for that, and her cool interviews with top physicists, and her pungent remarks about her chosen field. I wish her well. It must get *really old* to be an eternal postdoc, which is how she’s spent the last 15 years. She has a new appointment now, but it's another short-term contract. She says she'll be fine when that runs out, https://backreaction.blogspot.com/201.... Go, Sabine!
Here’s a good, long, detailed review of the book by Peter Woit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit , a theoretical physicist who is also critical of String Theory. This is the review to read first. Woit says, “you should get the book and read the whole thing” Indeed.
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wo...
Lots of links, too.
And here's a Reading Strategy for non-technical readers:
1. Read the first and last chapters
2. Read her end-of-chapter summaries for the rest.
3. Read the interviews! Some of the best stuff is here. Previews at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wo... Steven Weinberg!
4. Don't worry about the rest.
Rating: really liked it
Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist. This is her first book written for the lay audience. The author is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. The book is about the abuse of mathematics while pretending to do science. The book is a series of interviews with well-known physicists. She builds a case of how science fails to self-correct itself and set about proving a theory. Hossenfelder does some critical thinking that she outlines in the book. I understand the politics of science and Hossenfelder put her career on the line by writing this book. If you are interested in science/physics, this is a worthwhile book to read.
I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is eight hours and forty minutes. Laura Jennings does a good job narrating the book. Jennings is a voice actor and full-time audiobook narrator.
Rating: really liked it
A quick summary of the book’s contents: Many physicists these days are inclined to believe that beautiful, elegant theories are the only ones truly worth pursuing. Hossenfelder argues that this is the main reason why there hasn’t been a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for over 40 years. She asserts that this often debilitating aesthetic criteria has become a rigidly adhered-to dogma, and that physicists are in fact beating themselves soundly with their own outworn yardstick. She contends that this bias now interferes heavily with objectivity, which, believe it or not, is kind of an essential ingredient to any scientific discipline. This thought-provoking analysis of the limitations of beauty as a guideline is presented alongside several intriguing interviews of current physicists, which are interspersed throughout the text.
Topics examined in depth, or else merely touched on, poked fun at, ogled lasciviously (hey, physics can be pretty sexy!), or otherwise brought to the reader’s attention, include: a brief history of physics, the standard model of particle physics, supersymmetry, the notion of “naturalness,” string theory, the multiverse, quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, grand unification, and issues with the basic structure and methodology of the scientific community which unfortunately tend to discourage innovation.
Pros: I agree wholeheartedly with her main thesis, which is essentially that dogma has no absolutely place in science, and that scientists should be wary of biases which may be coloring their perspective and influencing their methodology. (This is obviously a gross oversimplification of her case, and I would urge anyone interested in her exact arguments and supporting evidence, to read the book themselves. While it isn’t terribly long, it
is terribly illuminating and informative.) Also, the interviews were quite fascinating; it was very helpful to hear what various big names in physics had to say on the matter at hand. And lastly, I couldn’t help but enjoy her snarky sense of humor. The book is full of unexpectedly sarcastic remarks, and I found this undeniably refreshing. For instance, here is her (humorous) rationale for studying history:
“While I was in school I hated history, but since then I have come to recognize the usefulness of quoting dead people to support my convictions.”
Very cute.
Cons: At times, it was a bit repetitive, and could have benefited from more rigorous editing and tighter overall organization. It is also heavier on Philosophy of Science than I was expecting it to be, though this is clearly a subjective preference—perhaps you’re a fervid devourer of that kind of thing, in which case the abundance of philosophical material will instead constitute a distinct advantage.
Bottom line: I am not a theoretical physicist, so I can’t really directly address any of the higher level physics Hossenfelder critiques. I will instead content myself here with reiterating what I thought was the strongest aspect of her principal argument: Dogma can be positively insidious. It can creep into areas, such as theoretical physics, you wouldn’t think would stand for it. The most important thing you can do is to be ever vigilant that your own thinking doesn’t become twisted, caged, or otherwise hindered by anything of that sort. Clearly, this is a truth applicable not only to modern physics, but to any field of science, and, more importantly, to life in general.
Lost in Math serves as a powerful reminder of this fact, and furthermore discusses quite a few strange and interesting facets of modern physics along the way. As such, it packs a considerable punch, and is well worth reading.
Rating: really liked it
About two years ago, I worked on particle physics phenomenology for my master's thesis. It's a mouthful, I know. It was also handful - if you can call it that. I spent months working on longass codes that I didn't completely understand, yet had to plough through anyway. (Don't come at me with 'nobody really understands codes that are thousands of lines long anyway' please.) It was also brainful (not mindful - DO NOT talk to me about blackhole spirituality or whatever and before you ask, yes, apparently it's a thing) because I essentially spent the whole year going through hundreds of research papers and trying to understand what the hell I was supposed to be doing. So what was I doing? I was trying to theoretically deduce the masses of some particles observed at the large hadron collider. Now here's the thing: there are thousands of ways to go about it, so take your pick like I did, and voila! Thesis subject ready! How and why is it this way you ask? Because:
The most astounding fact about high-energy physics is that you can get away with knowing nothing about it.Needless to say, I've got no chill for non-falsifiable theories anymore. The energies we need to verify any infamous theory-of-everything (surprise, surpise : there isn't just one. There are actually many, many candidates) are far, far, far, far above anything we could produce in the near future or even before our collective annihilation. So what's the particle physics community doing you ask? This is where the author and I have no chill left. We are pouring billions of dollars into funding research that isn't really going anywhere because, say it with me, they're 'beautiful.' Apparently, beauty standards in physics have always led to fruitful results. Or so they say. The theories we have right now, are 'ugly', 'a mess' and rigorous i.e, not simple. Just google 'standard model Lagrangian.' Nobody wants to deal with that monstrosity.
But as the author extensively writes about in this book, applications of beauty standards in physics that aren't even well-defined (apparently it's just intuitive, but what even is intuition if not repeated encounters that lead to familiarity? We don't find quantum physics intuitive because for evolutionary reasons, we didn't have to deal with it everyday. We exist on the macro-scale) to just particle physics. Studies show that research in physics seem to have actually stagnated while several papers claim to have found something 'ground-breaking' or 'exciting' or 'amazing.' Everyone finds a novelty these days. What a wonderful world.
The author here is tired, sceptical, exasperated and just about done with accepting bullshit from her colleagues, because the said bullshit is leading physics to a dead-end. Look man, she isn't saying that these pursuits are worthless, but she is saying that nobody on our planet has the means to build a particle accelerator the size of jupiter right now and it doesn't seem likely that we'll get closer to building one in the near future either. So maybe it would be worthwhile to check our biases before pouring billions of dollars into funding these research areas? Maybe there are more beautiful laws to be discovered, calculated, verified. But maybe the math is just ugly and we need to grind through it.
Rating: really liked it
UpdatedAn absolute delight for a physicist, this book details deterioration of modern theoretical physics into a metaphysical argument. In a series of interviews with a cohort of famous theoreticians, Sabine Hossenfelder gives an excellent overview of the current state of physics - this pillar of sciences.
Physics as we know it (and science in general) was born out of the premise that theoretical constructs and hypotheses should be evaluated on how well they describe empirical data. What if we reach a point where we cannot even design an experiment that would help choose between conflicting theories? What if a theory is such that no experiment could ever falsify it - a contradiction with data would just lead to a recalibration of parameters of the theory ad infinitum? That would be worrying. What is even more worrying that it is exactly in this state where modern physics finds itself today.
It gets even worse. Having no new experimental data, theoretical physicists of today have turned to other criteria to determine the validity of their mathematical constructs. Such arbitrary criteria include "beauty", "symmetry", "naturalness". All of these have nothing to do with the scientific process as Karl Popper described it.
The author goes back in time to examine one the most successful theories of the past century - quantum mechanics. This theory has proved to be exceptionally accurate in explaining and predicting experimental results. It has given rise to quantum electrodynamics and the standard model of particle physics (Higgs boson - the most successful prediction of the standard model cost about 10 billion Euro to find). Quantum mechanics also made it possible to build nuclear weapons.
Despite the extraordinary success of quantum mechanics the dispute about its meaning rages on. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is the most widely used one but it appears to be philosophically flawed in its requirement of an "observer". "Is the Moon not there when nobody's looking?" Among other competing interpretations no consensus exists. Thus, if you decide to study physics, you will most likely learn the Copenhagen approach.
In addition to questions relating specifically to theoretical physics Sabine Hossenfelder discusses some bigger issues in the scientific community. There is an excellent description on the conflict of interest between innovative thinking and getting an acceptable result and peer recognition, the need to "market" the results of research and spend significant amount of time in search of funding.
Maybe it's time to go from Lakatos back to Popper after all?
My sincere gratitude to Katia for suggesting that I read this book.
Rating: really liked it
I figured that if Luboš Motl hated the book this much, it had to be worth reading. It's usually a sound principle, and it didn't let me down this time either.
Rating: really liked it
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
Rating: really liked it
One of my favourite illustrations from a science title was in Fred Hoyle's book on his quasi-steady state theory. It shows a large flock of geese all following each other, which he likened to the state of theoretical physics. In the very readable Lost in Math, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder exposes the way that in certain areas of physics, this is all too realistic a picture. (Hossenfelder gives Hoyle's cosmological theory short shrift, incidentally, though, to be fair, it wasn't given anywhere near as many opportunities to be patched up to match observations as the current version of big bang with inflation.)
Lost in Math is a very powerful analysis of what has gone wrong in the way that some aspects of physics are undertaken. Until the twentieth century, scientists made observations and experiments and theoreticians looked for theories which explained them, which could then be tested against further experiments and observations. Now, particularly in particle physics, it's more the case that physicists dream up whole rafts of theory supported only by mathematics, much of which can never be experimentally confirmed, and what can be checked is often so expensive to work on that only a very small number of possibilities can be examined.
It's the maths (if we're talking beauty, I have to confess I find 'math' a very ugly word) that is in the driving seat, which surely is wrong. As Hossenfelder points out, string theory works best if the cosmological constant value that reflects the expansion or contraction of the universe is negative. Unfortunately it's actually positive, but most string theorists spend their time working with a negative cosmological constant. It can make for beautiful mathematics - but has nothing to do with our universe.
It's also the case that the vast majority of theoretical advances in physics were made by individuals, where now most theoreticians work in teams - it's tempting to wonder, if a camel is a horse designed by committee, what is a theory developed by group consensus?
Hossenfelder repeatedly comes back to two measures used to test theories - beauty, which is inevitably a subjective phenomenon, even though there is some agreement of what is required for beauty - and naturalness, which appears more scientific as it involves numbers, but relies on a bizarre confidence that values in nature that are dimensionless (for example ratios of masses) should be Goldilocks-like in not being too big or two small, but should be around the value of 1. The physicists she speaks to through the book (nearly all male), often seem to cling onto these measures without being able to justify them, other than saying that everyone else likes them too. There are some attempts - one suggests the appeal to beauty is an evolutionary response to a successful theory, but that only shows a weak understanding of evolution (though evolutionary developments can, at least, probably explain the physicists' love of symmetry - and it's not because nature has to be that way, but because we find symmetrical faces attractive).
Vast amounts of physicist-hours are being put into theories such as string theory, which seems pretty much incapable of doing the main job it is supposed to (though does have some side benefits), or defending the extension of the standard model of particle physics called supersymmetry, even as more and more evidence suggests it is unlikely to be true. Hossenfelder shows that clinging to theories past their sell-by date is almost inevitable because physicists are people too. If you've spent half your career on a theory, you don't give it up easily, even though scientists are supposed to love falsification. And if hundreds of other people (remember the geese) are working on a particular theory, surely it must have some substance behind it? One thing the book doesn't mention, but may be worth thinking about, is perhaps there are too many theoretical physicists? Hossenfelder points out in a period of about a year when the LHC produced data that looked interesting but turned out to be a statistical fluctuation, 500 papers were published exploring this non-event theoretically, many published in top journals.
Relatively briefly, Hossenfelder also examines the aspects of modern academic scientific life that make it hard to give the amount of time to actually working on theory that should be the case, citing estimates of around 40% going to actual work (another 40% going to grant applications). The processes required to get funding also tend to work against original thinking and deviating from the goose flock - there seems little doubt that this structure makes a large negative contribution to the whole business, though no one seems to have an answer to the problem.
The only negative I have with the book is that Hossenfelder, like many practising physicists, struggles to explain some of the actual physics in a way that conveys any meaning to the general reader. Luckily, this is not essential here - this is not a book to learn about physics, but about the way modern physicists work. Interestingly, Hossenfelder complains that 'popular science books about special relativity are often full of rocket ships and satellites passing each other. But all of this is unnecessary decoration. Special relativity follows from the three symmetries [she lists] above, without twins in spaceships and laser clocks and all that.' While this is true, the way symmetries are used here is an argument that is near-impossible to follow for a non-mathematician. The twins paradox and light clocks make it much easier for the rest of us to get a grip on the subject (and, to be fair, my undergraduate special relativity textbook makes use of both, so it's not just popular science doing it).
Inevitably there will be a widespread negative reaction from the physics community (which has already started) - but this is not surprising when Hossenfelder is attempting to burst a self-reinforcing social bubble just as powerful as those that surround American political parties. The knee-jerk reaction is always to deny there's anything wrong - yet here it seems so obviously a case of the emperor's new clothes.
Some readers may take this book to be an anti-science one - but it really isn't. Hossenfelder is merely pointing out a deep problem in some parts of physics, but she in no way undermines the remarkable scientific discoveries that have come from centuries of physics (and applications we benefit from as a result of some of them). Rather, she is saying that people in her profession need to step back from the coalface and take stock of what they are really doing and whether this particular approach really makes sense. True creativity often requires this - but most of us find it difficult to do. And it's about time a physicist said this.
Highly recommended (and very brave).
Rating: really liked it
reads like a Mary Roach book about particle physics -- altogether too many "human interest physics" elements, including descriptions of one interviewee's cats ("Astrokate", apparently a ...twitter authority). Woit already handled a lot of this in 2007 with Not Even Wrong. Hossenfelder makes few useful suggestions, instead just dumping on people when she's not flying to Hawaii. I couldn't disagree with her central thesis -- leaning hard on "beautiful math" is no substitute for testability and responding to experiment, and the entire physics academic economy seems busted -- but what else is there? Everyone could work on Navier-Stokes, I suppose.
Rating: really liked it
I've listened to this. And I definitely plan to read it properly once more on paper. It is a great book. There are a lot of physical theories and hypotheses. At the same time, the experiments are very expensive. So it should be some benchmark that play role in the selection process. It is far from the obvious, but apparently the main criteria that define which perspective physical theories are to be tested are ... beauty, elegance and simplicity. How much I wish it would work smoothly! But the main message of the book is that the application of those criteria in spite of being very attractive, has lead the modern physics into very difficult situation.
The whole premise is extremely fascinating. But exploring this, the author touches upon quite solid array of topics from the modern physics to the philosophy of science and even the economics of research. And she is doing it in a beautiful, elegant and simple manner (not pan intended or is it?).
Rating: really liked it
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.
>>> ARC received thanks to
Perseus Books, Basic Books via NetGalley <<<
Rating: really liked it
I honestly don't know how to rate this book. Some arguments were extremely worthwhile and needed a voice. In regard to those arguments, Hossenfelder's voice was razor sharp, clear, unafraid, questioning, critical, and informative. Other times though, it really felt as if she overshot -- a lot, which muddied the waters for her better arguments. Prior to this book, I watched talks given by Hossenfelder in which she picked apart my heroes. She criticized them for being guided by beauty. Watching her tear apart the arguments of these men who I pretty much worship was shocking but very satisfying. I love having my beliefs challenged. So, Hossenfelder's work was appealing to me, even when she went after my idol Dirac. But, in . my opinion, this book takes the "beauty is not a good guide" argument too far.
I feel unsettled. I also feel less informed that Hossenfelder about many aspects of physics, which made it even more difficult to rate this book.
Is the LHC worth the money since SUSY has not made an appearance? I don't know. It's a concern, and one worth discussing. After all, it's a lot of money. But are all discussions of the multiverse bad science? I think suggesting so goes too far. You can imagine that our tools will only get better and better. Our ability to explain the universe in equations will only get better. Is Everett's Many Worlds the only way to understand our universe? Probably not. Prior to Everett, we could not have conceived of equations that suggest every possibility is real instead of the wave function collapse. It's extremely valuable to keep thinking about bubble universes, warped spacetime, the arrow of time, and other ideas that lead us to think about a multiverse. It seems extremely defeatist to think researchers should not suggest ideas that are untestable. How many testable hypotheses came into existence because people continued to wonder about things that were not testable? In thinking about the untestable, we might come up with certain aspects of the untestable situation that we *can* test.
I just feel like we should fight against people who turn physics into pseudoscience (the laws of attraction, crystal healing, etc) and stop trying to inhibit people who are trying to answer the big questions. Question their methods, their logic, and their findings. Science needs that. This book seems to go beyond that.
Rating: really liked it
It is reassuring to know that there are quite a few people out there not happy with how physics is going these days.
Reading, for example, Krauss’ half-assed pompous non-explanation for why there is something instead of nothing, or reading Tegmark’s incoherent ramblings about his mathematical universe as he pats himself on the back for being oh such a crazy maverick, or basically watching the entire string community pat their collective backs so hard they will break each other’s shoulder blades despite having precisely bupkis to show for all their effort except some convoluted math they claim is real dang pretty though it has crap-all to do with the real world and then demand that we loosen up with that pesky scientific method because really what did that old thing ever do for us, and all this when even I, as an
at my absolute best enthusiastic amateur can poke holes the size of ocean liners through their reasoning… well, the whole thing starts to look like a rather sad affair.
But then people like Hossenfelder come along and reassure me that yes, there are people with the relevant scientific training able to see beyond the blinkered view offered by the mainstream, people able to step back and do real meta-physics, in the sense of having an outside look at what physics is doing and asking some hard questions about where the whole thing is heading. It also helps that she is a pretty good writer with a sharp sense of humor, not afraid to go around asking some pretty big names about those same hard questions, exposing their faulty reasoning and certainty that, yes, generations before us people were pretty silly and thought that if a theory is beautiful and elegant it must be true, and they were wrong, but that
totally can’t happen to us, because now we are real smart and our theory now is waaaay too beautiful and elegant, so it must be true.
Oh, and the reaction – well, just the butthurt incoherent misogynistic spittle-flinging trumpian response from a certain
Professor Motl whose whole point seems to boil down to “what a dumb woman-creature, questioning me and my brilliant buddies who are brilliant because we think we are!” was worth the price of admission and serves as a clear double-thumbs-up recommendation for the book.
Rating: really liked it
80th book for 2019.
Hossenfelder's central thesis—that physicists are are now obsessed by beauty (i.e., elegant mathematics), to the detriment of truth (i.e., hard data)—is certainly interesting.
The book contains a series of interviews with leading theoretical physicists, where she discusses the role of elegance/beauty/simplicity in theory assessment, but while these discussions are in themselves fascinating—Steve Weinberg's is hilarious—they are often colored by what seems to be a superior, almost patronizing tone, which seems associated with her own lack of tenure/status.
More importantly she does a relatively poor job of equipping the lay reader with enough background information to grasp the significance of her critiques. So in the end you are left with a somewhat shallow overview/critique of modern theoretical physics, with little guidance about how things could be done better.
3-stars.
