Looks like she has an interesting book -- just ordered a copy.
Was there a big bang?ie: what was before the big bang ?
Looks like she has an interesting book -- just ordered a copy.
Why can't mathematicians be as eloquent as physicists?"Hossenfelder’s real target, when you strip away some unfortunate terminology, is not beauty but self-satisfaction,which encourages disengagement from reality." - Wilczek is mansplaining what Hossenfelder really meant so nicely...
Anyway, I thought of the experimental detection of Majorana fermions as a counterargument to the book, but indeed no spectacular discovery or theory come to my mind and Google didn't help.
I've seen this attraction to beauty (often associated with simplicity) at every step when I worked in physics. An example is Bloch theorem in condensed matter physics. Many modern materials are heavily diluted or defected crystals. Still, carriers in them are usually theoretically described by Bloch functions, derived under the assumption that the crystal lattice is perfectly periodic (i.e. no defects)!
A more correct (imho) model needs to take into account the disorder and correlations, and would be a nasty and difficult piece of work... I will mercifully stop here. Still, I believe in the power of aesthetic sense (there must be some connection in our brain between recognising the good and perceiving the beautiful, and evolution could have trained it both ways?). But beauty belongs to living forms and their morals/souls, and not loop corrections to muon decays, carbon allotropes and other objects and abstractions (diamonds are an exception which confirms the rule!).
So maybe "beauty" is an excuse for laziness?"Hossenfelder’s real target, when you strip away some unfortunate terminology, is not beauty but self-satisfaction,which encourages disengagement from reality." - Wilczek is mansplaining what Hossenfelder really meant so nicely...
Anyway, I thought of the experimental detection of Majorana fermions as a counterargument to the book, but indeed no spectacular discovery or theory come to my mind and Google didn't help.
I've seen this attraction to beauty (often associated with simplicity) at every step when I worked in physics. An example is Bloch theorem in condensed matter physics. Many modern materials are heavily diluted or defected crystals. Still, carriers in them are usually theoretically described by Bloch functions, derived under the assumption that the crystal lattice is perfectly periodic (i.e. no defects)!
A more correct (imho) model needs to take into account the disorder and correlations, and would be a nasty and difficult piece of work...
her sityation sounds like a lot of folk on LinkedinI am enjoying Hossenfelder's book. It's a good read for the beach, but maybe not that interesting to non-physicists (or non-ex-physicists). I'm about half-way through and she's bemoaning her seemingly endless search for the next temporary research position. So, it's a nice mix of general critique, interviews, and her personal story.