Lost in math

A clear, pleasant to read book. I'd really give it a 3.5, but since I need to go up or down, it definitely needs to go up. 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.

I really have to take a star off because the title at a glance is frankly slightly misleading: the author does not believe math is the problem so much as mathematical beauty, and very much does not advocate getting rid of math in physics or using less math. Having 'Lost in Math' in bold makes it sound like math is the problem.

She does, however, think physics is not math, a position I disagree with (although I don't quite agree with Tegmark either - my position is a bit peculiar in that I think there is really only one consistent and complete mathematical system of sufficient complexity to be the world, a position Godel makes decidedly unpopular as he showed Peano arithmetic and anything like it must be incomplete) but that is also not what the book is really about: it's a bunch of interviews with physicists and her interpretation of how physics has gone astray, such as chasing after explaining values that 'look mathematically ugly' rather than doing what she thinks would be more fruitful, like looking at inconsistencies such as between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Constants such as values close to 1 are beautiful, other values are not, the coupling constants of the forces almost aligning but not quite is ugly compared to having them actually align, etc. Supersymmetry (often combined with string theory), one of those attempts to explain from beauty, has failed horribly at predicting new particles. Only the Higgs showed up at the LHC, and as such, physics is in a bit of crisis at the moment with some even trying to move away from scientific falsifiability as a criterion of what makes sense in order to salvage their theories (though string theory should really be called 'we hope we have a theory', as no one even knows what M theory is!) instead of simply dumping those theories as dead ends.

This reader can't help but note that from a mathematical perspective this particular sense of beauty isn't even really the case in actual mathematics: many mathematicians find e and pi beautiful but they are the furthest thing from 1, being totally irrational and weird little numbers. So the beauty here referenced is very much a physicist's view of mathematical beauty and not even necessarily a pure mathematician's view! In the sense that ideally a theory should explain all numbers, I do agree with those who would try to explain numerical coincidences, but in the sense that it should be all numbers explained and beauty or not of them totally irrelevant I agree with Sabine.