It did not take long before I was lost in this book. But after a week(s) of reading, I had a sense of the author’s argument. I felt like the book was a direct attack on How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, the book that channeled the physicists who worked to solidify the standard model of quantum physics in the 1970s. Hossenfelder, a particle physicist, is having none of it and she is mad and frustrated with the last 50 years of physics theory. Her bitterness seeps through the pages like a photon zipping through space. She does a great job of explaining the current research in high-energy physics and has interviews with a number of leading lights in the field, pressing them on the lack of progress, in spite of experiments that cost billions of dollars and take decades to complete. It is impossible to not feel sympathy for her cause – her entire professional career has been tilting at windmills. She feels that the scientists in her rarified field are letting the subjective direct their research. She all but calls the string theorists and supersymmetry advocates charlatans. Her argument that the esoteric, beauty and naturalness, have no place in basic science research is understandable. The book is pretty technical, but surprising light on hard-core mathematics – very few equations are shown. My biggest complaint (after getting over the initial “sour grapes” feeling) was her failure of taking into account the long view. Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica published in the 17th century was not fully embraced for fifty years. Classical mechanics was refined (and is still vital) and was not superseded until well into the 20th century. The idea that physics should have a breakthrough in Hossenfelder’s lifetime is a bit of hubris. Those readers who are put off by the breathless prose of some popular physics authors will enjoy this somewhat cynical view of the state of the art.
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