Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

But the seductive power of mathematical beauty has come under criticism lately. In Lost in Math, a book published earlier this year, the theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder asserts that mathematical elegance led physics astray. Specifically, she argues that several branches of physics, including string theory and quantum gravity, have come to view mathematical beauty as a truth criterion, in the absence of experimental data to confirm or refute these theor

Her criticism has gotten more attention than justified by its merits. No one has argued that beauty holds precedent over truth

View on HN

In a recent blogpost [1], Hossenfelder responds to a review of her book. All but the first two paragraphs are basically a response to this idea. A brief excerpt:

> In most cases, however, physicists are not aware they use arguments from beauty to begin with (hence the book’s title). I have such discussions on a daily basis.

> Physicists wrap appeals to beauty into statements like “this just can’t be the last word,” “intuition tells me,” or “this screams for an explanation”. They have forgotten that naturalness is an argument from beauty and can’t recall, or never looked at, the motivation for axions or gauge coupling unification. They will express their obsessions with numerical coincidences by saying “it’s curious” or “it is suggestive,” often followed by “Don’t you agree?”.

[…]

> What physicists are naive about is not appeals to beauty; what they are naive about is their own rationality. They cannot fathom the possibility that their scientific judgement is influenced by cognitive biases and social trends in scientific communities. They believe it does not matter for their interests how their research is presented in the media.

Have you read the book or any of her posts about the ideas in the book? There are in fact a lot of people who do claim that research programs and research dollars should be prioritized because of ideas like naturalness or beauty, even when decades of increasingly expensive and time-consuming work has led to no support for the natural or beautiful hypothesis.

[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-philosopher-of-sc...

There's no need for anyone to read her book, because it's just a pile of garbage written by someone who doesn't have a clue about modern physics. Hossenfelder is an armchair physicist who failed in her discipline and started writing books for profit. The very idea of naturalness is basically the thing people hope the machines will someday do - namely think and be able to explain what is actually going on through fleshing out noise from the essential mechanisms.

The stuff she writes on her blog are so stupid it's beyond belief. First she criticizes theorists (who write far more reasonable and far less philosophical articles than she) for using advanced mathematics and exploring various possibilities, a minute later she criticizes experimenters for trying to build a better particle collider. She's a person who would gladly see the resources flowing to the less skilled wannabe-physicists with no real knowledge, because she's one of them.

I find Hossenfelder problematic because if you look at the rhetoric the blog post itself is relying on intuition and in essence a beauty argument in order to make a sociological point. I think Hossenfelder has a point about the state of professional physics, but the way this is communicated is unclear and lacks this rhetorical introspection as well. It's why her posts draw so much attention; the strong assertions, the arguing, and how the unrigorous writing itself obscures this.

> No one has argued that beauty holds precedent over truth

Here's Paul Dirac, writing in 1963:

"it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment. [...] It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress."

Here's John Schwarz, one of the pioneers of string theory, explaining why he and a collaborator kept working on it in the early 1970s after quantum chromodynamics turned out to be a better way of dealing with the strong nuclear force and before it emerged as a promising approach to quantum gravity:

"We felt strongly that string theory was too beautiful a mathematical structure to be completely irrelevant to nature."

The idea that string theory is "so beautiful it must be right" is, I think, mostly a strawman -- you hear critics of string theory taking it down, rather than advocates of string theory talking it up -- but the idea that beauty is a reliable guide to truth in physics isn't so strawy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com