Brett Hodnett reviewed Lost in math by Sabine Hossenfelder
Interesting read
4 stars
A clear, pleasant to read book. It's always good to question fundamental assumptions, which is what this book is about. She does a good job of trying to get a variety of viewpoints, though I do think she may be overstating her case, but my lack of understanding of theoretical physics makes this difficult to judge. By suggesting that her critique applies to all science does seem like overreaching, though she only does this tangentially. This is particularly the case because a big part of her argument rests on the idea that theoretical physics has reached a point where it's difficult to obtain data, so a lot of what they do is conjecture, and they can get "lost in math" when there is no data to show if their theories are true in the real world. This is most definitely not the case in most fields of science which have …
A clear, pleasant to read book. It's always good to question fundamental assumptions, which is what this book is about. She does a good job of trying to get a variety of viewpoints, though I do think she may be overstating her case, but my lack of understanding of theoretical physics makes this difficult to judge. By suggesting that her critique applies to all science does seem like overreaching, though she only does this tangentially. This is particularly the case because a big part of her argument rests on the idea that theoretical physics has reached a point where it's difficult to obtain data, so a lot of what they do is conjecture, and they can get "lost in math" when there is no data to show if their theories are true in the real world. This is most definitely not the case in most fields of science which have the opposite problem of so much data that it is impossible to get to it all. Overall though it's a very thought provoking book, and may teach you a fair bit about theoretical physics along the way.