Lost In Math

Sabine Hossenfelder

503.15 HOS BeavLib 2018

blog . wikipedia

Beauty (AKA "naturalness") is an arbitrary aesthetic of mathematics, and determines what is publishable for speculative "physics without data".

Of course, when there is no data, the number of seemingly consistent maps of missing data are infinite. "Rigor" means resemblance to previously accepted maps.

This book is very important, but seems a bit redundant and wandering. The author travelled to interview a handful of renowned theoretical physicists, such as Steven Weinberg at UT Austin, and it seems that most of these interviews were included, with some redundancy.