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.
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About the author
Made My Brain Hurt in a Good Way
First of all, I'm a dentist and neither a physicist nor philosopher. That said, I've long had an interest in cosmology, particle physics, critical thinking (including biases and heuristics), and philosophy, and I've read numerous books by authors referenced by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder in "Lost in Math." Given my lay reader status, I'd estimate that I really understood about 25%, mostly grasped another 25%, vaguely had an idea of 25%, and had no clue what she was talking the last 25% of the book. :-) Also given my lay reader status, I make no judgements about her descriptions of the problems currently being studied, proposed, or tested in particle physics. From everything I've read until now, they seem pretty on-target though. Ok.......got all the disclaimers out of the way. :-)Dr. Hossenfelder's writing style is just delightful. She's self-deprecating and regularly acknowledges that she could be completely wrong. She has a wry, ironic, sardonic and insightful sense of humor, which literally made my laugh out loud. I have never read a book about particle physics that made me laugh so much, that my wife looked up from her chair and asked what was so funny. Since I believe she is German, and English is her second language (I might be wrong about that), I'm even more amazed at her literary skill. Despite being moderately fluent in German myself, I could never write an equivalent book about dentistry in German.I appreciated that Dr. Hossenfelder interviewed many physicists, who embraced many different viewpoints, most of which disagreed with her own ideas about problems in particle physics, both theoretical and experimental. There's no apparent attempt to cherry pick perspectives, theories, or beliefs.Her concluding chapter addresses head on the most common problems in human biases, cognitive dissonances, and heuristics. She then applies them directly to what she perceives as the biggest potential problems in physics today: the underlying and widespread beliefs that the concepts of naturalness, simplicity, and elegance - summarized as the aesthetics of theories - may be fundamentally flawed. That the self-reinforcing nature of humans and human communities, even in scientific groups that should be more aware of the very problem, is pushing physics into further examination of ideas that have yielded a depressing dearth of results in the last 30 years. She acknowledges the successes, while laying out the problems that are glossed over, extrapolated beyond reason, and says, "Hey, maybe these concepts need to be reexamined."I thoroughly enjoyed the book and recommend it highly, as long as the reader has at least some passing with physics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and critical thinking.
Top reviews from other countries
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Iv@n.R.SReviewed in Brazil on August 14, 2023
De grande importância para quem quer explorar melhor esses temas...
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- Sagi CohenReviewed in Canada on August 1, 2020
Sharp, Funny, Idealistic - a kind of Kuhn-meets-Geertz-meets-Snowden in advanced Physics
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ArnoudReviewed in the Netherlands on July 15, 2021
Kritische overdenkingen over de koers die de wetenschap volgt
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