Lost In Math
Sabine Hossenfelder
503.15 HOS BeavLib 2018
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. The ideas are very good, and the prose is readable (always a surprise to a US monolingual; she writes better than I do).
My guess is that Dr. Hossenfelder will endure some withering attacks, and also find allies, who will share supporting examples and ideas. She will tighten her arguments, and produce a second book (or second edition) that will change science. Think of this book as "the Voyage of the Beagle"; worth reading, but foreshadowing "On the Origin of Species", which began the transformation of biology from "stamp collecting" to a quantitative, predictive science that is still accelerating almost two centuries later. Transforming physics from "theory collecting" into a disciplined search for neglected experimental evidence, maximizing "proven surprise per megabuck", will take us in directions that will shake science to its roots. There's a lot to learn, and we will not find it by staring into a stew of symbols.
References to check (notes written too fast ...)
Maudlin T 2015 "Why physics needs philosophy
I think the firewall paradox is simply based on a faulty proof. See Hossenvelder S 2015 "Disentangling the black hole vacuum" Phys. Rev. D 91:044014 arXiv:1401.0288 . Regardless of its status however, it's interesting to see what consequences my colleagues have drawn.
Banaji 2013 Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People Multco, Washco