Scan barcode
lpm100's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review: Lost in Math
5/5 stars
"Models are not data and predictions are not evidence."
*******
This is a brilliant book, and there's so much I don't think I'll ever be able to take it all in. (And I won't be rereading it for extra gleanings.)
And this is The Difficulty with many Pop Physics Books: People like the present reader have insufficient background in the subject (only two semesters of undergraduate Physics here), but want to understand it nonetheless.
Even just to sit down and write a review and try to bring across the pertinent concepts requires the reader to be "in the zone."
How to explain such conceptually dense things to somebody like they are a 6-year-old?
The author has done a pretty good job, the difficulty of the task notwithstanding.
And I have even managed to take away several new concepts from this text--even if I didn't fully understand many of them.
This book is also about the Philosophy of Science--But the author's full-throated defense of the Standard Model is the specific vehicle employed to illustrate several broad concepts in said Philosophy. (The fact that physicists don't like standard model and keep trying to come up with more beautiful theories that are never empirically verified is this author's bete noire.)
1. If you can't test it, is it science?
2. What does it mean for a theory to be aesthetic?
3. If a theory is "ugly," but it does correspond to experimental data..... What reason do you have to reject it in favor of a theory that is more mathematically elegant but does not do the same? (As used here, "ugly" means that there are a large number of parameters in the Standard Model.)
4. "The final call is based on our success it explaining observation. But absent observational tests, the most important property of theory must have is to find approval by our peers."
Factoids:
1. The number of physicists has increased by a factor of 100 over the last century.
2. It's not quite like it was in the early days, where people waited until they had something to say to write something down. These days, it is more like publish - perish, it's the perverse incentive for proliferation of ideas for their own sake. And with a corresponding decrease in relevance per paper.
3. The difference between the energies that we could produce and what were needed to test things were about 25 orders of magnitude a century ago. These days, there's another 15 orders of magnitude to go.
We may never get there: apparently "If we wanted to reach Planckian energies, We would need a particle collider about the size of the Milky Way. Or if we wanted to measure a quantum of the gravitational field - a gravitron - the detector would have to be the size of Jupiter and located not just anywhere but in orbit around a potent source of gravitrons, such as a neutron star."
4. Since there are so many ways to build a theory -- presently estimated at 10^500--The standard model is plausibly among them. But nobody has found it, and, given the huge number of possibilities, the odds are that nobody ever will.
*******
Some of the best quotes and germane points (for me to remember as well as that a reader of the review might find interesting).
The author is talking about subdisciplines/concepts of Physics:
1. Particle physics
2. Astrophysics
3. Cosmology
4. Quantum foundations
5. Phenomenology
6. Quantum mechanics
7. String theory
8. Quantum chromodynamics
9. Calabi Yau manifolds
10.Loop quantum gravity
11. Perturbation theory
12.Quantum Gravity
Quotes:
1. The closest you will get to an answer is following the trail of facts down into the basement of science. Follow it until facts get sparse and your onward journey is blocked by theoreticians arguing whose theory is prettier. That's when you know you've reached the foundations.
2. Math keeps us honest. It prevents us from lying to ourselves and to each other. You can be wrong with math, but you can't lie.
3. For the most part, physicists and mathematicians have settled on a fine division of labor in which the former complain about the finickness of the latter and the latter complain about the sloppiness of the former.
4. We first demonstrate that a new theory agrees with the well-confirmed old theories to within measurement precision, thus reproducing the old theory's achievements. Then we only have to add calculations for what more the new theory can explain.
5. The known particles are of two different types, fermions and bosons, and supersymmetry explains how these two types belong together.
6. As a physicist, I'm often accused of reductionism, is if that were an optional position to hold.
7. Being fundamental is a matter of current knowledge. What is fundamental today might no longer be fundamental tomorrow. What is emergent, however, will remain emergent.
8. How math connects to reality is a mystery that plagued philosophers long before they were scientists, and we aren't any wiser today. But luckily we can use the math without solving the mystery.
9. I can't believe what this once-venerable profession has become. Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed. And they're not even good at that.
10. The last time we had a theory of everything was 2,500 years ago..... The world was made up of four elements: Earth, water, air, and fire. Explaining everything was never so easy again.
11. I went into Physics because I don't understand human behavior. Two decades later, what prevents me from understanding Physics is that I still don't understand human behavior.
12. My life aspirations were those of the middle class, middle European family I come from: a good job, a nice house, a child or two, a cozy retirement, and a tasteful urn.
13. How patently absurd it must appear to someone who last had contact with Physics in 11th grade that people get paid for ideas like that. But then, I think, people also get paid for throwing balls through hoops.
14. There's yet another way to postulate new Physics and then hide it, which is to introduce fields that become relevant only at very long distances or very early in the universe, both of which are hard to test.
15. Like many theoretical physicists, I once considered switching to economics in the hope of better job opportunities. I wasn't impressed by the math, but I was stunned by the lack of data.
16. The inconsistency of special relativity with Newtonian gravity gave rise to general relativity. The inconsistency between special relativity and quantum mechanics led to quantum field theory.
17. Three lessons: a) If you want to solve a problem with math, first make sure it really is a problem; b) State your assumptions; c) observational guidance is necessary.
18. 500 theories to explain a signal that wasn't and 193 models for the early universe are more than enough evidence that current quality standards are no longer useful to assess our theories. To select promising future experiments, we need new rules.
******
Verdict: Recommended at the second hand price
Additional noteworthy concepts:
1. Symmetry: If the sky looks blue in every direction, then that dependence on direction is called a rotational symmetry. "The symmetries that physicists deal with are more abstract versions of this example, like rotations among multiple axes in internal mathematical spaces. But it always works the same way: find a transformation into which the laws of symmetry remain invariant, and you've found a symmetry."
2. Apophenia: liking to discover patterns in noise
3. Irvin Yalom (1980) describes four major “ultimate concerns”: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom.
5/5 stars
"Models are not data and predictions are not evidence."
*******
This is a brilliant book, and there's so much I don't think I'll ever be able to take it all in. (And I won't be rereading it for extra gleanings.)
And this is The Difficulty with many Pop Physics Books: People like the present reader have insufficient background in the subject (only two semesters of undergraduate Physics here), but want to understand it nonetheless.
Even just to sit down and write a review and try to bring across the pertinent concepts requires the reader to be "in the zone."
How to explain such conceptually dense things to somebody like they are a 6-year-old?
The author has done a pretty good job, the difficulty of the task notwithstanding.
And I have even managed to take away several new concepts from this text--even if I didn't fully understand many of them.
This book is also about the Philosophy of Science--But the author's full-throated defense of the Standard Model is the specific vehicle employed to illustrate several broad concepts in said Philosophy. (The fact that physicists don't like standard model and keep trying to come up with more beautiful theories that are never empirically verified is this author's bete noire.)
1. If you can't test it, is it science?
2. What does it mean for a theory to be aesthetic?
3. If a theory is "ugly," but it does correspond to experimental data..... What reason do you have to reject it in favor of a theory that is more mathematically elegant but does not do the same? (As used here, "ugly" means that there are a large number of parameters in the Standard Model.)
4. "The final call is based on our success it explaining observation. But absent observational tests, the most important property of theory must have is to find approval by our peers."
Factoids:
1. The number of physicists has increased by a factor of 100 over the last century.
2. It's not quite like it was in the early days, where people waited until they had something to say to write something down. These days, it is more like publish - perish, it's the perverse incentive for proliferation of ideas for their own sake. And with a corresponding decrease in relevance per paper.
3. The difference between the energies that we could produce and what were needed to test things were about 25 orders of magnitude a century ago. These days, there's another 15 orders of magnitude to go.
We may never get there: apparently "If we wanted to reach Planckian energies, We would need a particle collider about the size of the Milky Way. Or if we wanted to measure a quantum of the gravitational field - a gravitron - the detector would have to be the size of Jupiter and located not just anywhere but in orbit around a potent source of gravitrons, such as a neutron star."
4. Since there are so many ways to build a theory -- presently estimated at 10^500--The standard model is plausibly among them. But nobody has found it, and, given the huge number of possibilities, the odds are that nobody ever will.
*******
Some of the best quotes and germane points (for me to remember as well as that a reader of the review might find interesting).
The author is talking about subdisciplines/concepts of Physics:
1. Particle physics
2. Astrophysics
3. Cosmology
4. Quantum foundations
5. Phenomenology
6. Quantum mechanics
7. String theory
8. Quantum chromodynamics
9. Calabi Yau manifolds
10.Loop quantum gravity
11. Perturbation theory
12.Quantum Gravity
Quotes:
1. The closest you will get to an answer is following the trail of facts down into the basement of science. Follow it until facts get sparse and your onward journey is blocked by theoreticians arguing whose theory is prettier. That's when you know you've reached the foundations.
2. Math keeps us honest. It prevents us from lying to ourselves and to each other. You can be wrong with math, but you can't lie.
3. For the most part, physicists and mathematicians have settled on a fine division of labor in which the former complain about the finickness of the latter and the latter complain about the sloppiness of the former.
4. We first demonstrate that a new theory agrees with the well-confirmed old theories to within measurement precision, thus reproducing the old theory's achievements. Then we only have to add calculations for what more the new theory can explain.
5. The known particles are of two different types, fermions and bosons, and supersymmetry explains how these two types belong together.
6. As a physicist, I'm often accused of reductionism, is if that were an optional position to hold.
7. Being fundamental is a matter of current knowledge. What is fundamental today might no longer be fundamental tomorrow. What is emergent, however, will remain emergent.
8. How math connects to reality is a mystery that plagued philosophers long before they were scientists, and we aren't any wiser today. But luckily we can use the math without solving the mystery.
9. I can't believe what this once-venerable profession has become. Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed. And they're not even good at that.
10. The last time we had a theory of everything was 2,500 years ago..... The world was made up of four elements: Earth, water, air, and fire. Explaining everything was never so easy again.
11. I went into Physics because I don't understand human behavior. Two decades later, what prevents me from understanding Physics is that I still don't understand human behavior.
12. My life aspirations were those of the middle class, middle European family I come from: a good job, a nice house, a child or two, a cozy retirement, and a tasteful urn.
13. How patently absurd it must appear to someone who last had contact with Physics in 11th grade that people get paid for ideas like that. But then, I think, people also get paid for throwing balls through hoops.
14. There's yet another way to postulate new Physics and then hide it, which is to introduce fields that become relevant only at very long distances or very early in the universe, both of which are hard to test.
15. Like many theoretical physicists, I once considered switching to economics in the hope of better job opportunities. I wasn't impressed by the math, but I was stunned by the lack of data.
16. The inconsistency of special relativity with Newtonian gravity gave rise to general relativity. The inconsistency between special relativity and quantum mechanics led to quantum field theory.
17. Three lessons: a) If you want to solve a problem with math, first make sure it really is a problem; b) State your assumptions; c) observational guidance is necessary.
18. 500 theories to explain a signal that wasn't and 193 models for the early universe are more than enough evidence that current quality standards are no longer useful to assess our theories. To select promising future experiments, we need new rules.
******
Verdict: Recommended at the second hand price
Additional noteworthy concepts:
1. Symmetry: If the sky looks blue in every direction, then that dependence on direction is called a rotational symmetry. "The symmetries that physicists deal with are more abstract versions of this example, like rotations among multiple axes in internal mathematical spaces. But it always works the same way: find a transformation into which the laws of symmetry remain invariant, and you've found a symmetry."
2. Apophenia: liking to discover patterns in noise
3. Irvin Yalom (1980) describes four major “ultimate concerns”: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom.
mandolyte's review against another edition
5.0
Great easy to read intro current problems in theoretical physics
songmeo's review against another edition
3.0
Contrary to what I prepared myself for, it's not a tough read at all. I finished in a day.
I caught off guard when I realized this book was about physics, not math. Then I told my friend while we were chatting. He asked me "physics is math, no?". I thought he had a good point. But then I read from the book "physics isn't math. It's choosing the right math". I smiled and sent him the answer to his question.
This book is from a self-aware physicist about the struggles of physics in making the next breakthrough.
I love it.
I caught off guard when I realized this book was about physics, not math. Then I told my friend while we were chatting. He asked me "physics is math, no?". I thought he had a good point. But then I read from the book "physics isn't math. It's choosing the right math". I smiled and sent him the answer to his question.
This book is from a self-aware physicist about the struggles of physics in making the next breakthrough.
I love it.
peer_pastinakel's review against another edition
3.0
Convincing, could have been done in 3 blogposts instead.
rafasaur's review against another edition
5.0
Not only does this make excellent points about theoretical research in physics (and science at large), but also described physics concepts that have eluded me in a very clear way!
noel_rene_cisneros's review against another edition
Hossenfelder plantea en esta interesante y apasionante obra la historia de la física, pero, sobre todo, el estado en el que la física de partículas se encuentra en la actualidad, en el que los estudiosos de la supersimetría (SUSY) son quienes imperan y hacen sus teorías imperar sobre todo a partir de que las consideran bellas y elegantes, criterios que, nos dice Hossenfelder, no son científicos sino estéticos y que nada demuestra que el modelo matemático para explicar un fenómeno tenga porque ser bello. Altamente recomendable.
fractal_rabbit's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math has the same sense of humor as her YouTube videos and is an enjoyable read. The book follows her travels while she visits various physicists of varying levels of success, asking them their thoughts on the current state of fundamental physics and the aesthetic judgement of theories. She is especially critical of non-empirical theory assessment, like mathematical beauty, which many physicists aspire to follow but none can define. She would likely answer the question, "What makes a good theory," with the simple answer that it explains observation and nothing more.
Sabine makes interesting observations for the state of science today. A successful academic paper has the same recipe as a successful song: We want it to be surprising, but not *too* surprising. We still want the paper, or song, to follow the expected convention most of the time, but without intrigue and something unexpected, we wouldn't pay attention.
She points out the challenges that scientists face today in terms of job security: how there are many temporary research positions while tenured positions continue to dry up, and researchers are left to be put in a situation where they must constantly sell (and over-sell) the implications of their theories. This then leads to science suffering as most researchers only pursue *the most promising* ideas. But that raises the question: How do you determine the most promising ideas? Most likely, from the judgement of other scientists, who are similarly biased. Sabine says, "Don't trust me, I'm a scientist."
I especially enjoyed the last interview with George Ellis, which pointed out how some of the questions that preoccupy modern day physicists are philosophical questions, not physical ones. The lines between these fields seems to have blurred when we have scientists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss making claims that science proves that God doesn't exist--which science cannot prove. These scientists are not making scientific claims, but being sloppy philosophers. This results in a public hostility against science, and a question of what science can and cannot do? "What can it say about human values, about worth and purpose?"
Sabine says, "Is it ever justified to use aesthetic perception to assess laws of nature? Do we have any reason to believe that laws that are more fundamental should also be simpler? And if scientists churn out hypotheses by the hundreds to keep the presses going, what are good criteria to assess the promise of their ideas?
We need philosophers to bridge the gap between pre-scientific confusion and scientific argumentation."
Sabine akins the desire for physical laws to be beautiful a kind of "aesthetic bias," to be added to a list of cognitive biases that researchers can easily subcumb to. There are checks in experimental physics to prevent bias in its various forms, but Sabine makes the case for there to be more checks in theoretical physics as well.
Physics isn't math. It's choosing the right math. Doing the right math requires asking the right questions. Philosophers could provide aid to determine if we are asking the right questions. As George Ellis said, "Minding the boundary between science and philosophy, I think, could help physicists separate fact from belief. And I don't see a big difference between believing nature is beautiful and believing God is kind."
A must read for researchers, especially theoretical ones.
Sabine makes interesting observations for the state of science today. A successful academic paper has the same recipe as a successful song: We want it to be surprising, but not *too* surprising. We still want the paper, or song, to follow the expected convention most of the time, but without intrigue and something unexpected, we wouldn't pay attention.
She points out the challenges that scientists face today in terms of job security: how there are many temporary research positions while tenured positions continue to dry up, and researchers are left to be put in a situation where they must constantly sell (and over-sell) the implications of their theories. This then leads to science suffering as most researchers only pursue *the most promising* ideas. But that raises the question: How do you determine the most promising ideas? Most likely, from the judgement of other scientists, who are similarly biased. Sabine says, "Don't trust me, I'm a scientist."
I especially enjoyed the last interview with George Ellis, which pointed out how some of the questions that preoccupy modern day physicists are philosophical questions, not physical ones. The lines between these fields seems to have blurred when we have scientists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss making claims that science proves that God doesn't exist--which science cannot prove. These scientists are not making scientific claims, but being sloppy philosophers. This results in a public hostility against science, and a question of what science can and cannot do? "What can it say about human values, about worth and purpose?"
Sabine says, "Is it ever justified to use aesthetic perception to assess laws of nature? Do we have any reason to believe that laws that are more fundamental should also be simpler? And if scientists churn out hypotheses by the hundreds to keep the presses going, what are good criteria to assess the promise of their ideas?
We need philosophers to bridge the gap between pre-scientific confusion and scientific argumentation."
Sabine akins the desire for physical laws to be beautiful a kind of "aesthetic bias," to be added to a list of cognitive biases that researchers can easily subcumb to. There are checks in experimental physics to prevent bias in its various forms, but Sabine makes the case for there to be more checks in theoretical physics as well.
Physics isn't math. It's choosing the right math. Doing the right math requires asking the right questions. Philosophers could provide aid to determine if we are asking the right questions. As George Ellis said, "Minding the boundary between science and philosophy, I think, could help physicists separate fact from belief. And I don't see a big difference between believing nature is beautiful and believing God is kind."
A must read for researchers, especially theoretical ones.
garciaj42's review against another edition
3.0
This felt more like a review of modern science focusing on quantum mechanics rather than explaining what has been misinterpreted due to a desire for simplicity/beauty