Lost in Math—How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

Author: Sabine Hossenfelder
Publisher: Basic Book 2018

Sabine is a theoretical physicist from Germany.  She wonders if the theoretical physics is heading in the wrong direction. 

In the first chapter titled “The Hidden Rules of of Physics” she realizes that she doesn’t understand physics anymore.  She talks to friends and colleagues to see if she is not the only one confused, and sets out to bring reason back to Earth.

The second chapter is titled “What a Wonderful World”.  In which she reads a lot of books about dead people and finds that everyone likes pretty ideas but that pretty ideas sometimes work badly.  At a conference she begins to worry that physicists are about to discard the scientific method.

“The State of the Union” is the third chapter.  Here she sums up ten years of education in twenty pages and chats about the glory days of particle physics.

She sees “Cracks in the Foundations” next.  She does her best to accept that nature is not natural, everything “we” learn is awesome, and that nobody gives a f**k what she thinks.   (It is a new trend in scientific writing to use profanities.)

She examines “Ideal Theories” in the fifth chapter.  She searches for the end of science but finds that the imagination of theoretical physicists is endless.

She ponders the difference between math and magic in the next chapter titled “The Incomprehensible Comprehensibility of Quantum Mechanics”.

In “One to Rule Them All”, she tries to find out if anyone would care about the laws of nature if they were not beautiful.  

“Space, the Final Frontier” … She tries to understand a string theorist and almost succeeds.

In “The Universe, All There Is, and the Rest” she admires the many ways to explain why nobody sees the particles “we” invent.

In the last chapter titled “Knoledge Is Power” she concludes that the world would be a better place if “everyone” listens to her.

—In this book “we” and “everyone” refers mostly to theoretical physicists.—

She is knowledgeable, sometimes funny, but mostly annoying.  “You” may like the book or “you” may not. (Here “you” refers to casual readers.)  You “need” to read additional articles along the way, and even if you do that, you may still feel “ambivalent” in the end.  

(Ambivalent is the closest word I can think of what I feel.  I searched the Internet to find a suitable word but couldn’t find one.  In the process I learned about the Portuguese word “saudade” and listened to Cesaria Evora’s song Sodade. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVrdYGiULM)

The following is a little teaser from the 9th chapter.

The particularly lucky numerical coincidence that has driven much research in astrophysics is the “WIMP miracle”.  WIMP stands for “Weakly Interacting Massive Particle”.  These particles are presently most popular candidates for dark matter.  From their mass and interaction rate “we” can estimate how many WIMPs would have been produced in the early universe, and this gives about the correct abundance of dark matter, near the observed value of 23%.  This is the WIMP miracle.

The experimentalists working with a detector originally designed to catch solar neutrinos reported in 1986 on the first “interesting bounds on galactic cold dark matter and on light bosons emitted from the sun”.

In plain English, “interesting bounds” means they did not find anything.  

Various other neutrino experiments at the time also obtained interesting bounds.  Detector after detector of interesting acronyms such as COSME, NaI32, BPRS. DEMOS, IGEX, DAMA, CRESST-I, EDELWEISS, ELEGANTS, CDMS, Rosebud, HDMS, GEDEOn, GENIUS, GERDA, ANAIS, CUORE, XELPLin, XENON 10, XMASS, CREST-II, SuperCDMS, ZEPLIN II, ZEPLIN III, CoGeNT, ORPHEUS, SIMPLE, PICASSO, MAJORANA, CDEX, PandaX, DRIFT, XENON100, all reported interesting bounds.  Further experiments are under construction.

Thirty years have passed.  Dark matter still has not been detected.

She went philosophical in the last chapter.  The following are some of the biases theoretical physicists have.

(1) The Social Desirability Bias

“We” are more likely to put forward opinions that “we” believe will be well received by others.

(2) Confirmation Bias

If you search the literature for support of your argument, there it is.  If you look for a mistake because your results didn’t match your expectations, there it is.

(3) Motivated Cognition

It makes “us” believe positive outcomes are more likely than they really are.

(4) Sunk Cost Fallacy

(More commonly known as throwing good money after bad. Recall the WIMP miracle.)

(5) In Group Bias

“We” think researchers in our own field are more intelligent than others.

(6) The Shared Information Bias

This is why “we” keep discussing what everyone knows but fail to pay attention to information held by a few people.

(7) Apophenia

“We” like to discover patterns in the noice.

(8) Belief Bias

“We” think arguments are stronger if the conclusion seems plausible.

(9) The Halo Effect

“You” (here the meaning of “you” is the same as the meaning of “we”) are more interested in what a Nobel price winner says than a lesser known scientist says regardless of the topic.

(10) False Consensus Effect

“We” tend to overestimate how many other people agree with us, and how much they do so.

(11) Attention Bias

“We” consider a fact to be more likely, the more often “we” hear about it.

(12) Communal Reinforcement

This turns scientific communities to echo chambers, in which researchers repeat their arguments back to each other over and over again, constantly reassuring themselves they are doing the right thing.

(13) Blind Spot Bias

This is the mother of all biases.  Drum roll, please … The insistence that we certainly are not biased.

One final note about the book: Her colleagues and friends advised her not to write this book.