I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

I truly appreciate Lost in Math. What I value the most about the book is the tone. Sabine Hossenfelder offers an honest, humorous and self-deprecating view to a topic that would not be considered "light". I appreciate also her bringing perspectives from many researchers in the field, and doing so respectfully, without belligerence, and again, humorously (when I grabbed this book I was not expecting to laugh as much as I did). Sometimes, the theories explained went above me, but that is due to my own limitations, not the author's capabilities in explaining them. I actually understood many concepts and the figures intercalated in the text were a good aid to comprehension. ( )

I can't say I understood any of the physics in this. Yet I read the whole thing. (Save the appendices.) Because she keeps it so funny, and because the premise is simple: we should harbor no expectation that nature should be beautiful; and science should be about finding the truth, not coming up with beautiful theories. "We don't seek theories to evoke emotional reactions; we seek explanations for what we observe." Yet physicists keep working on theories where the math is 'beautiful', regardless whether these theories bear any relation to reality or can even hoped to be proven or disproven.

Hossenfelder is a physicist based in Germany. She literally travels the world to write this book, interviewing physicists, often wearing out her welcome, to ask each of them about their work; why do they think this is beautiful and the other unsatisfying, and above all, why do they think we should care what's beautiful. She's harsh in her criticism of getting "lost in math" to the detriment of what should be the main business of explaining the world. Or in her words:

"Maybe I'm just here to find an excuse for leaving academia because I'm disillusioned, unable to stay motivated through all the null results. & what an amazing excuse i have come up with - blaming a scientific community for misusing the scientific method."

Some passages that made things simple enough for even me to understand:

"If you have a map of a mountainous landscape that doesn't show altitudes, winding roads won't make much sense. But if you know there are mountains, you understand why the roads curve like that - it's the best they an do. That we cannot see the curvature of space-time is like having a map without altitude lines. If you could see space-time curvature, you would understand it makes perfect sense for planets to orbit around the Sun. It's the best they can do."

"It makes sense, intuitively, that our intuition fails in the quantum world. We don't experience quantum effects in daily life... Indeed, it would be surprising if quantum physics were intuitive, because we never had a chance to get accustomed to it. Being unintuitive therefore shouldn't be held against a theory. But like lack of aesthetic appeal, it is a hurdle to progress. & maybe, I think, this isn't a hurdle we can overcome. Maybe we're stuck in the foundations of physics because we've reached the limit of what humans can comprehend." ( )

Il sottotitolo di questo libro è "Come la bellezza ha portato i fisici fuori strada". L'autrice, fisica teorica, si è man mano allontanata dalla visione dei suoi colleghi, sostenendo che si stanno sempre più allontanando dalla formulazione di teorie basate su esperimenti o che possono essere da essi validate, cercando invece di imporle semplicemente per la loro "bellezza". Il termine non è troppo vago: la bellezza può trovarsi nelle formule matematiche semplici oppure nella mancanza di fine tuning, cioè di valori molto grandi o molto piccoli che non possono essere predetti a priori ma devono essere misurati. Hossenfelder scrive in modo molto spigliato, reso bene da Giuseppe Bozzi (che però non può tradurmi "mostruosa congettura di fantasia" la Moonshine conjecture a pagina 205 o parlare di distribuzione di probabilità "piccata" anziché concentrata a pagina 278!). Però l'idea di costruire il libro sulle interviste che ha fatto ai pezzi grossi della fisica teorica non mi convince molto, perché in questo modo tende a ripetere più volte gli stessi concetti; non sperate inoltre di avere idea di come funzionano le varie teorie, a meno che non ne sappiate già qualcosa. (Per i maligni che pensano che il mio giudizio sia falsato dal mio amare la matematica, assicuro che non è così: anzi concordo che la matematica è di ausilio alla fisica ma non può essere il suo principio guida). ( )

Interesting and thought provoking book. But the author does not define "beauty". And as the author no doubt knows, with indefinite terms, the subject matter are subject to opinion. And in the physical sciences, that can never be.

It is hard to imagine that the "beautiful world" envisioned by a Karl Marx is going to be considered beautiful by the workers it enslaves. Thus what is "beautiful" to one is not necesarily "beautiful" to another. If a scale of beauty-ugly exists, regardless of what is being viewed, two obervers will ultimately have their sliders in different positions!

Put another way: what is beautiful to the duck hunter is hardly beautiful to the duck!

So beauty/ugly, like right/wrong, good/bad are opinion only (judges and moral codes were invented to handle those other things!) and require a viewpoint or an outcome to be defined. The same thing can be both beautiful and ugly to an outside observer.

Surely if physicists were being trained that way, progress would be poor to nonexistent since the physicist would be unable to defend his view.
And equally clearly the author does not find the search for a beautiful truth to be beautiful! Oh well...

But the author does make a rather interesting point: the lack of progress in the physical sciences.

Perhaps the author is really looking for a new simplicity.

If I have been bothered by anything in the physical sciences it is that the basics of natural philosophy have remained undefined. If a universe consists of matter, energy, space and time, a close examination of these terms demonstrates that their definitions are yet dependent on one another. Matter requires space, energy requires space, time demands perception of changes of matter in space. Definitions of these terms are descriptive, associative and disociative but not absolute. We are left with the conundrum "what is space?" and that question has not been answered. We all have an experience of space but that does not mean it is an understood phenomenon. 29 physics texts I have looked at use the word. None define it. Doesn't seem fair..

Yet modern astrophysics says the universe is expanding which I interpret to mean that space is expanding! So space must be being created! Oh, it doesn't mean that? Then what does it mean? See, if you have the right definition, there can be no argument. I chuckle at scientific debates for they really should be about defining terms, not who's right and who is wrong. A debate only implies no one has defined some term and the debate would disappear if the term were yet defined! And a debate only inflames disagreement making it harder to resolve the definition. Time could be better spent!

And would not an expanding universe imply that laws of conservation of energy are incorrect? Surely if this universe emanated from a big bang (the cause of which would not be in this universe but "pre-this universe" and would have occured "before time"), then matter must have been created too! And ultimately the conservation of energy would only be an approximation.

At the bottom of all this must be a simplicity. And the search for that simplicity holds the key to understanding this universe and all in it. Else, why study it? And that simplicity may be beautiful or it may not be. But generally, simplicities may be regarded as being beautiful if they explain phenomenon being seen, having been seen and will be seen. BUt then, that is my own definition of beauty. In this case, beauty would be a consequence, not a cause. If it isn't beautiful, so be it.

The author states that she wanted to understand and this is common to most students who follow the subject of science of their own willingness. The key would be looking for something in this universe which contains neither matter, energy, space nor time but is REAL. Actually it exists. But few physicists can even conceive of it. And it's right there in front of you. And with it the phenomenon described above might be explained, unreal as it may seem. ( )

Fascinating overview of the field ( )