Book Update: Books are printed!

Lara.

I had just returned from my trip to Dublin when the door rang and the UPS man dumped two big boxes on our doorstep. My husband has a habit of ordering books by the dozens, so my first thought was that this time he’d really outdone himself. Alas, the UPS guy pointed out, the boxes were addressed to me.

I signed, feeling guilty for having forgotten I ordered something from Lebanon, that being the origin of the parcels. But when I cut the tape and opened the boxes I found – drumrolls please – 25 copies “Lost in Math”. Turns out my publisher has their books printed in Lebanon.

I hadn’t gotten neither galleys nor review copies, so that was the first time I actually saw The-Damned-Book, as it’s been referred to in our household for the past three years. And The-Damned-Book is finally, FINALLY, a real book!

The cover looks much better in print than it does in the digital version because it has some glossy and some matte parts and, well, at least two seven-year-old girls agree that it’s a pretty book and also mommy’s name is on the cover and a mommy photo in the back, and that’s about as far as their interest went.

Gloria.

I’m so glad this is done. When I signed the contract in 2015, I had no idea how nerve-wrecking it would be to wait for the publication. In hindsight, it was a totally nutty idea to base the whole premise of The-Damned-Book on the absence of progress in the foundations of physics when such progress could happen literally any day. For three years now I’ve been holding my breath every time there was a statistical fluctuation in the data.

But now – with little more than a week to go until publication – it seems exceedingly unlikely anything will change about the story I am telling: Fact is, theorists in the foundations of physics have been spectacularly unsuccessful with their predictions for more than 30 years now. (The neutrino-anomaly I recently wrote about wasn’t a prediction, so even if it holds up it’s not something you could credit theorists with.)

The story here isn’t that theorists have been unsuccessful per se, but that they’ve been unsuccessful and yet don’t change their methods. That’s especially perplexing if you know that these methods rely on arguments from beauty even though everyone agrees that beauty isn’t a scientific criterion. Parallels to the continued use of flawed statistical methods in psychology and the life sciences are obvious. There too, everyone kept using bad methods that were known to be bad, just because it was the state of the art. And that’s the real story here: Scientists get stuck on unsuccessful methods.

Some people have voiced their disapproval that I went and argued with some prominent people in the field without them knowing they’d end up in my book. First, I recommend you read the book before you disapprove of what you believe it contains. I think I have treated everyone politely and respectfully.

Second, it should go without saying but apparently doesn’t, that everyone who I interviewed signed an interview waiver, transferring all rights for everything they told me to my publisher in all translations and all formats, globally and for all eternity, Amen. They knew what they were being interviewed for. I’m not an undercover agent, and my opinions about arguments from beauty are no secret.

Furthermore, everyone I interviewed got to see and approved a transcript with the exact wording that appears in the book. Though I later removed some parts entirely because it was just too much material. (And no, I cannot reuse it elsewhere because that was indeed not what they agreed on.) I had to replace a few technical terms here or there that most readers wouldn’t have understood, but these instances are marked in the text.

So, I think I did my best to accurately represent their opinions, and if anyone comes off looking like an idiot it should be me.

Most importantly though, the very purpose of these interviews is to offer the reader a variety of viewpoints rather than merely my own. So of course I disagree with the people I spoke with here and there – because who’d read a dialogue in which two people constantly agree with each other?

In any case, everything’s been said and done and now I can only wait and hope. This isn’t a problem that physicists can solve themselves. The whole organization of academic research today acts against major changes in methodology because that would result in a sudden and drastic decrease of publishing activity. The only way I can see change come about is public pressure. We have had enough talk about elegant universes and beautiful theories.

If you still haven’t made up your mind whether to buy the book, we now have a website which contains a table of contents and links to reviews and such, and Amazon offers you can “Look Inside” the book. Two video trailers will be coming next week. Silicon Republic writes about the book here and Dan Falk has a piece at NBC titled “Why some scientists say physics has gone off the rails.”