How Physics Lost its Way

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: John Horgan <jhorgan () stevens edu>
> Date: July 2, 2018 at 9:10:59 PM GMT+9
> To: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com>
> Subject: How Physics Lost its Way
>
> Dave, FYI:
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> How Physics Lost its Way
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> Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder claims the desire for beauty and other subjective biases have led physicists astray.
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> Does anyone who follows physics doubt it is in trouble? When I say physics, I don’t mean applied physics, material 
> science or what Murray-Gell-Mann called “squalid-state physics.” I mean physics at its grandest, the effort to figure 
> out reality. Where did the universe come from? What is it made of? What laws govern its behavior? And how probable is 
> the universe? Are we here through sheer luck, or was our existence somehow inevitable?
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> .... For an authoritative critique of this grand quest, check out the fascinating, painfully honest new book Lost in 
> Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, by Sabine Hossenfelder. Hossenfelder, who specializes in quantum gravity, 
> became a physicist two decades ago because she believed that physics represents our best hope of understanding 
> reality. With its combination of mathematical logic and empirical evidence, physics helps us overcome wishful 
> thinking and other biases. Ideally.
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> Lost in Math tells the story of Hossenfelder’s disillusionment, her realization that subjective factors, such as an 
> obsession with beauty, have infected physics. Aesthetic considerations guide physicists’ judgments of strings, 
> inflation, supersymmetry, multiverses and the many different interpretations of quantum mechanics.
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> Physicists seem to adhere to Keats’s old aphorism that truth equals beauty. In the absence of data, that principle 
> reduces physics to a matter of taste, not truth. You like string theory and Bach, I prefer loop-space theory and the 
> Beatles. “I’m not sure anymore that what we do here, in the foundations of physics, is science,” Hossenfelder writes. 
> “And if not, why am I wasting my time with it?”...
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> Continue reading at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-physics-lost-its-way/
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