Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray QUOTES

1 " There are other reasons we use math in physics. Besides keeping us honest, math is also the most economical and unambiguous terminology that we know of. Language is malleable; it depends on context and interpretation. But math doesn’t care about culture or history. If a thousand people read a book, they read a thousand different books. But if a thousand people read an equation, they read the same equation. "

― Sabine Hossenfelder , Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

3 " It took twenty-five years from the prediction of the neutrino to its detection, almost fifty years to confirm the Higgs boson, a hundred years to directly detect gravitational waves. Now the time it takes to test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than a scientist’s full career. This forces theorists to draw upon criteria other than empirical adequacy to decide which research avenues to pursue. Aesthetic appeal is one of them. In our search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It’s a guide, a reward, a motivation. It is also a systematic bias. "

― Sabine Hossenfelder , Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

5 " When asked to judge the promise of a newly invented but untested theory, physicist draw on the concepts of naturalness simplicity or elegance and beauty. These hidden rules are ubiquitous in the foundations of physics. They are invaluable. And in utter conflic with the scientific mandate of objectivity. "

― Sabine Hossenfelder , Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

7 " In physics, theories are made of math. We don’t use math because we want to scare away those not familiar with differential geometry and graded Lie algebras; we use it because we are fools. Math keeps us honest—it prevents us from lying to ourselves and to each other. You can be wrong with math, but you can’t lie. "

― Sabine Hossenfelder , Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

9 " Arguments from beauty have failed us in the past, and I worry I am witnessing another failure right now. “So what?” you may say. “Hasn’t it always worked out in the end?” It has. But leaving aside that we could be further along had scientists not been distracted by beauty, physics has changed—and keeps on changing. In the past, we muddled through because data forced theoretical physicists to revise ill-conceived aesthetic ideals. But increasingly we first need theories to decide which experiments are most likely to reveal new phenomena, experiments that then take decades and billions of dollars to carry out. Data don’t come to us anymore—we have to know where to get them, and we can’t afford to search everywhere. Hence, the more difficult new experiments become, the more care theorists must take to not sleepwalk into a dead end while caught up in a beautiful dream. New demands require new methods. But which methods? I hope the philosophers have a plan. "

― Sabine Hossenfelder , Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

11 " The main reason we use math in physics, however, is because we can. "

― Sabine Hossenfelder , Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

13 " foundational physics, which is far from experimental test as science can be while still being science "

― Sabine Hossenfelder , Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

15 " Their theories, they believe, are too good to not be true. "

― Sabine Hossenfelder , Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray