Sabine Hossenfelder: Lost in Math

And that is why, argues Sabine Hossenfelder, physics hasn’t made a major theoretical breakthrough in more than four decades. Indeed, this modern preoccupation with beauty has become so dogmatic that it is now in utter conflict with what we actually see in the natural world. Led by their aesthetic criteria, physicists have concocted mindboggling new theories and invented dozens of new particles. They have declared that we are projections of a higher-dimensional space, and that space is spawned with wormholes that tie together distant places. But observation has been unable to confirm almost all of these ideas. Worse, these theories are in fact so difficult to test, that they are actually untestable. Some are untestable even theoretically. Still, theoreticians are convinced that their math contains an element of truth about nature, simply because it strives towards elegance and beauty. These “too good to not be true” theories have left the field stuck in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink the way they build physics theories. By embracing messiness and complexity in mathematics, Hossenfelder shows, they can bridge the gap that has separated theoreticians and experimentalists in recent decades. Only then can science discover the truth, not as our preoccupations would have it, but as it is.