Jun 7, 2020 04:42 PM
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/0...-math.html
EXCERPT (Sabine Hossenfelder): My book Lost in Math was published two years ago, and this week the paperback edition will appear. I want to use the occasion to tell you why I wrote the book and what has happened since. In Lost in Math, I explain why I have become very worried about what is happening in the foundations of physics. [...] We have not made progress for 40 years. The problems we are trying to solve today are the same problems we were trying to solve half a century ago.
This worries me [...] scientific progress will eventually be reduced to working out details of applications of what we already know. ... overall societal progress depends crucially on progress in the foundations of physics, more so than on any other discipline. I know that a lot of scientists in other disciplines find that tremendously offensive. But if they object all I have to do is remind them that without breakthroughs in the foundations of physics there would be no transistors, no microchips, no hard disks, no computers, no wifi, no internet. There would be no artificial intelligence, no lasers, no magnetic resonance imaging, no electron microscopes, no digital cameras. Computer science would not exist. Modern medicine would not exist either because the imaging methods and tools for data analysis would never have been invented. In brief, without the work that physicists did 100 years ago, modern civilization as we know it today would not exist.
I find it somewhat perplexing that so few people seem to realize how big of a problem it is that progress in the foundations of physics has stalled. Part of the reason, I think, is that physicists in the foundations themselves have been talking so much rubbish that people have come to believe foundational work is just philosophical speculation and has lost any relevance for technological progress.
Indeed, I am afraid, most of my colleagues now believe that themselves. [...] So, my book Lost in Math is an examination of what has gone wrong. As the subtitle says, the problem is that physicists rely on unscientific methods to develop new theories. These methods are variations of arguments from mathematical beauty, though many physicists are not aware that this is what they are doing... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Sabine Hossenfelder): My book Lost in Math was published two years ago, and this week the paperback edition will appear. I want to use the occasion to tell you why I wrote the book and what has happened since. In Lost in Math, I explain why I have become very worried about what is happening in the foundations of physics. [...] We have not made progress for 40 years. The problems we are trying to solve today are the same problems we were trying to solve half a century ago.
This worries me [...] scientific progress will eventually be reduced to working out details of applications of what we already know. ... overall societal progress depends crucially on progress in the foundations of physics, more so than on any other discipline. I know that a lot of scientists in other disciplines find that tremendously offensive. But if they object all I have to do is remind them that without breakthroughs in the foundations of physics there would be no transistors, no microchips, no hard disks, no computers, no wifi, no internet. There would be no artificial intelligence, no lasers, no magnetic resonance imaging, no electron microscopes, no digital cameras. Computer science would not exist. Modern medicine would not exist either because the imaging methods and tools for data analysis would never have been invented. In brief, without the work that physicists did 100 years ago, modern civilization as we know it today would not exist.
I find it somewhat perplexing that so few people seem to realize how big of a problem it is that progress in the foundations of physics has stalled. Part of the reason, I think, is that physicists in the foundations themselves have been talking so much rubbish that people have come to believe foundational work is just philosophical speculation and has lost any relevance for technological progress.
Indeed, I am afraid, most of my colleagues now believe that themselves. [...] So, my book Lost in Math is an examination of what has gone wrong. As the subtitle says, the problem is that physicists rely on unscientific methods to develop new theories. These methods are variations of arguments from mathematical beauty, though many physicists are not aware that this is what they are doing... (MORE - details)