20 Years BackRe(Action)

In case anyone is still reading this...

It's been 20 years since I set up this blog, briefly after I moved from Tucson to Santa Barbara. Since then, I have further moved along to Canada, got married, moved to Sweden, had two children, moved back to Germany, wrote two books, set up a YouTube channel and here we are.

The past few years have been difficult as I have developed some chronic health issues that my doctors can't quite pin down.

We have also, despite many attempts, still not found a house for the family. This is partly because we live in one of the most expensive regions of Germany, and partly because we are tied to the area with my husband's employer being located nearby and the kids in school. My so-called "studio" is really just a piece of green cloth pinned to a basement wall, and it's sharing space with a treadmill, a cross-trainer and cubic meters of junk. That said, the most recent development is that we might have found a place after all, so if you stick around for a little longer maybe you'll get to see the new studio...

Research-wise I am afraid that my opinion of the current status of the foundations of physics has only gotten more negative. The entire research area that has gotten stuck on unscientific methodology that they pass on from one generation to the next. I cannot see any way that this problem will resolve, unless possibly because artificial intelligence will take over.

In the past 20 years, I have made many friends online and I think of you as my extended family. Thanks for sticking around.

I had to turn off comments on this blog long ago because it ended up being >95% junk. But you can join our community on patreon.

I can't believe this really happened.

I'm left somewhat speechless here.

Sugar Alcohols Ruined My Health: Learn From My Mistakes

I was told that I have irritable bowel syndrome. I then learned by shear coincidence that most of my symptoms were instead caused by food additives collectively known as "sugar alcohols". Since I have cut sugar alcohols out of my diet, my symptoms have almost entirely disappeared. If you have irritable bowel syndrome (or have been told you have it), I suggest you try cutting out sugar alcohols. You will know within two days or so whether that was the cause of the problem.

Book Update

The US version of my book "Lost in Math" is about to be published as paperback. You can now pre-order it, which of course you should.

I am quite pleased that what I wrote in the book five years ago has held up so beautifully. There has been zero further progress in the foundations of physics and, needless to say, there will be zero progress until physicists understand that they need to change their methodology. Chances that they actually understand this are not exactly zero, but very close by.

In other news, on Monday I gave an online seminar about Superdeterminism, which was recorded and is now available on YouTube. Don't despair if Tim doesn't quite make sense to you; it took me a year to figure out that he isn't as crazy as he sounds.

The How The Light Gets in Festival which is normally in Hay-on-Wye has also been moved online. I think that's great, because Hay-on-Wye is a tiny village somewhere in the middle of nowhere and traveling there has been somewhat of a pain. Indeed, I had actually declined the invitation months ago. But since I can now attend without having to sit on a car, a bus, a plane, a train, and a taxi, I will be in a debate about Supersymmetry tomorrow (May 23) at 11:30am BST (not CEST) and giving a 30 mins talk about my book at 2pm (again that's BST).

Coronavirus? I have nothing to add.

I keep getting requests from people that I comment on the coronavirus pandemic, disease models, or measures taken to contain and mitigate the outbreak. While I appreciate the faith you put into me, it also leaves me somewhat perplexed. I am not an epidemiologist; I’m a physicist. I have nothing original to say about coronavirus. Sure, I could tell you what I have taken away from other people’s writings – a social media strain of Chinese Whispers, if you wish – but I don’t think this aids information flow, it merely introduces mistakes.

I will therefore keep my mouth shut and just encourage you to get your information from more reliable sources. When it comes to public health, I personally prefer institutional and governmental websites over the mass media, largely because the media has an incentive to make the situation sound more dramatic than it really is. In Germany, I would suggest the Federal Ministry of Health (in English) and the Robert Koch Institute (in German). And regardless of where you live, the websites of the WHO are worth checking out.

I have not come across a prediction for the spread of the disease that looked remotely reliable, but Our World in Data has some neat visualization tools for the case numbers from the WHO (example below).

Having said that, what I can do is offer you a forum to commiserate. I got caught in the midst of organizing a workshop that was supposed to take place in May in the UK. We monitored the situation in Europe for the past weeks, but eventually had to conclude there’s no way around postponing the workshop.

Almost everyone from overseas had to cancel their participation because they weren’t allowed to travel, or, if they had, their health insurance wouldn’t have covered had they contracted the virus. At present only Italy is considered a high risk country in Europe. But it’s likely that in the coming weeks several other European countries will be in a similar situation, which will probably bring more travel restrictions. Finally, most universities here in Germany and in the UK have for now issued a policy to cancel all kinds of meetings on their premises so that we might have ended up without a room for the event.

We presently don’t know when the workshop will take place, but hopefully some time in the fall.

I was supposed to be on a panel discussion in Zurich next week, but that was also cancelled. I am scheduled to give a public lecture in two weeks which has not been cancelled. This comes to me as some surprise because it’s in the German state that, so far, has been hit the worst by coronavirus. I kind of expect this to also be cancelled.

Where we live, most employers have asked employees to work from home if anyhow possible. Schools will be closed next week until after the Easter break – for now. All large events have been cancelled. This puts us in a situation that many people are facing right now: We’ll be stuck at home with bored children. I am actually on vacation for the next two weeks, but looks like it won’t be much of a vacation.

I’m not keen on contracting an infectious disease but believe sooner or later we’ll get it anyway. Even if there’s a vaccine, this may not work for variants of the original strain. We are lucky in that no one in our close family has a pre-existing condition that would put them at an elevated risk, though we worry of course about the grandparents. Shopping panic here has been moderate; the demand on disinfectants, soap and, yes, toilet paper, seems to be abnormally high, but that’s about it. By and large I think the German government has been handling the situation well and Trump’s travel ban is doing Europe a great favor because shit’s about to hit the fan over there.

In any case, I feel like there isn’t much we can do right now other than washing our hands and not coughing other people in the face. I have two papers to finish which will keep me busy for the next weeks. Wherever you are, I hope you stay safe and healthy.

Update: As anticipated, I just got an email saying that the public lecture in April has also been cancelled.

Away Note

I'm attending a conference in Oxford the coming week, so there won't be much happening on this blog. Also, please be warned that comments may be stuck in the moderation queue longer than usual.

Job opening: Database specialist/Software engineer

I am looking for a database specialist to help with our SciMeter project. The candidate should be comfortable with python, SQL, and linux, and have experience with backend web programming. Text mining skills would come in handy.

This is paid contract work which has to be completed by the end of the calendar year. So, if you are interested in the job, you should have some time at hand in the coming months. You will be working with our team of three people. It does not matter to us where you are located as long as you communicate with us in a timely manner.

If you are interested in the job, please send a brief CV and a documentation of prior completed work to hossi@fias.uni-frankfurt.de with the subject "SciMeter Job 2019". I will explain details of the assignment and payment to interested candidates by email.

Away Note

I'll be in the Netherlands for a few days to attend a workshop on "Probabilities in Cosmology". Back next week. Wish you a good Summer Solstice!

Book and travel update

The French translation of my book “Lost in Math” has now appeared under the title “Lost in Maths: Comment la beauté égare la physique”.

The Spanish translation has now also now appeared under the title “Perdidos en las matemáticas: Cómo la belleza confunde a los físicos.” I don’t speak Spanish, but for all I can tell, the title is a literal translation.

On Thursday (May 23rd) I am giving a public lecture in Barcelona. The lecture, it turns out, will be simultaneously translated into Spanish. This, I think, will be an interesting experience.

The next talks I have scheduled are a colloquium in Mainz, Germany, on June 11, and a public lecture in Groningen, Netherlands, on June 21st. The public lecture is associated with the workshop “Probabilities in Cosmology” at the University of Groningen.

I declined the invitation to the Nobel Laureate meeting in Lindau because I was informed they would only cover my travel expenses if I agree in advance to write about their meeting for a 3rd party. (If you get pitches about the meeting, please ask the author for a COI.)

After some back and forth, I accepted the invitation to SciFoo 2019, mostly because I couldn’t think of a way to justify declining it even to myself.

The fall is filling up too. The current plan looks roughly like this: On September 21st, I am giving a public lecture in Nürnberg. Early October I am in Brussels for a workshop. Mid of October I am giving a public lecture at the University of Minnesota. (I have not yet booked the flight for this trip. So if you want me to stop by at your institution for a lecture on the way, please get in touch asap.) End of October I am giving a lecture in Göttingen, and the first week of November I am in Potsdam and, again, in Berlin.

From November on, I will be unemployed, at least that is what it presently looks like. Or maybe I should say I will be fully self-employed. Either way, I will have to think of some other way to earn money than doing calculations in Anti-DeSitter space.

Finally, here is the usual warning that I am traveling for the rest of the week and comments on this blog will be stuck in the moderation queue longer than usual.

Away Note/Travel Update/Interna

I will be away next week, giving three talks at Brookhaven National Lab on Tuesday, April 9, and one at Yale April 10.

Next upcoming lectures are Stuttgart on April 29 (in Deutsch), Barcelona on May 23, Mainz on June 11, (probably) Groningen on June 22, and Hamburg on July 5th.

I may or may not attend this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting, and have a hard time making up my mind about whether or not to go to SciFoo, because, considering the status of my joints, it’s a choice between physical and financial pain, and frankly I’d rather chose neither.

In any case, I am always happy to meet readers of my blog, so if our paths should cross, please do not hesitate to say Hi.

It follows the obligatory note about slow traffic on this blog while I am traveling: I have comment moderation on. This means comments will only appear after I have manually approve them. Sometimes I sleep, sometimes I am offline, sometimes I have better things to do than checking my inbox. As a result, comments may sit in the queue for a while. Normally it does not take longer than 24 hours.

Let me also mention that I no longer read comments posted as “Unknown”. I have no idea what Google is doing, but the “Unknown” comments are today what anonymous comments were a decade ago. The vast majority of those are spam, and most of the rest are insults and other ill-informed nonsense. I do not have time for this and therefore collectively forwarded them straight to junk.

There have also recently been some (?) people who tried to post random strings of letters or, in some cases, single letters. I am assuming this was to try if the comment feature works. I will not approve such comments, so it is not a useful method to figure out what is going on.

Just Move (I’ve been singing again)

I have spent the last few weekends shouting at a foam mat. It’s nothing personal. Foam and I, we normally get along just fine. It’s just that I was hoping to improve my singing technique. Also, shouting may come in handy on other occasions, you never know.

Alas, my shouting success was limited. It’s hard to project anger at a foam mat. But somewhere along the way I seem to have spontaneously developed a head-voice vibrato, not sure how come. Probably a sign that my head is becoming increasingly hollow.

Besides that, I have a new pre-amplifier which works better than the previous one, but has a markedly different noise pattern that I yet have to get used to. If my voice sounds different, that’s probably why. That, or the hollow head.

(Soundcloud version here.)

Away Note

I am in London for a few days and comments are likely to pile up in the queue more than usual. Pls play nicely while I'm away.

Particle physicists surprised to find I am not their cheer-leader

Me and my Particle Data Booklet.

In the past week, I got a lot of messages from particle physicists who are unhappy I wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times. They inform me that they really would like to have a larger particle collider. In other news, dogs still bite men. In China, bags of rice topple over.

More interesting than particle physicists’ dismay are the flavors of their discontent. I’ve been called a “troll” and a “liar”. I’ve been told I “foul my nest” and “play the victim.” I have been accused of envy, wrath, sloth, greed, narcissism, and grandiosity. I’m a pessimist, a defeatist, and a populist. I’m “to be ignored.” I’m a “no one” with a “platform” who has a “cult following.” I have made quick career from an enemy of particle physics, to an enemy of physics, to an enemy of science. In extrapolation, by the end of next week I’ll be the anti-christ.

Now, look. I’m certainly not an angel. I have a temper. I lack patience. I’m “eye-for-eye” rather than “turn the other cheek”. I don’t always express myself as clearly as I should. I make mistakes, contradict myself, and don’t live up to my own expectations. I have regrets.

But I am also a simple person. You don’t need to dig deep to understand me. To first approximation, I mean what I say: We currently have no reason to think a next larger particle collider will do anything but confirm the existing theories. Particle physicists’ methods of theory-development have demonstrably failed for 40 years. The field is beset by hype and group-think. You cannot trust these people. It’s a problem and it’s in the way of progress.

It hurts, because they know that I know what I am talking about.

Thursday, I gave a colloquium at the University of Giessen. In Giessen, physics research is mostly nuclear physics and plasma physics. They don’t have anyone working in the fields I’m criticizing. Nevertheless, it transpired yesterday that following my Op-Ed some people at the department debated whether I am a “populist” who better not be given a “forum”.

For starters, that’s ridiculous – a physics colloq at the University of Giessen is not much of a forum. Also, I have been assured the department didn’t seriously consider uninviting me. Still, I am disturbed that scientists would try to shut me up rather than think about what I say.

I didn’t know anything about this, however, when I gave my talk. It was well attended, all seats taken, people standing in the back. It was my usual lecture, that is a brief summary of the arguments in my book. I got the usual questions. There is always someone who asks for an example of an ugly theory. There is always someone who asks what’s wrong with finding beauty in their research. There’s always someone who has a question that’s more of a comment, really.

Then, a clearly agitated young man raised his arm and mumbled something about a heated discussion that had taken place last week. This didn’t make sense to me until later, so I ignored it. He then explained he didn’t read my book, and didn’t find anything objectionable about my talk. Must have been some disappointment, I guess, to see I’m not Rumpelstiltskin. He said that “everyone here agrees” that those failed predictions and the hype surrounding them are a problem. But, he wailed, how could I possibly go and publicly declare that one cannot trust scientists?

You see, the issue they have isn’t that I say particle physics has a problem. Because that’s obvious to everyone who ever had anything to do with the field. The issue is that I publicly say it.

Why do I say it? Because it’s true. And because the public needs to know. And because I have given up hope they will change their ways just because what I say is right. You cannot reach them with reason. But you can reach them by drawing attention to how much money is going to waste because scientists refuse to have a hard look at themselves. Lots of money. Money that could be put to better use elsewhere.

Now they are afraid, and they feel betrayed. And that’s what you see in the responses.

The first mode of defense is denial. It goes like this: Particle physics is doing just fine, go away, nothing to see here. Please give us more money.

The second mode of defense is urging me to stay in line and, at the same time, warning everyone else to keep their mouth shut. Over at Orbiter Magazine, Marcelo Gleiser and some other HEP people (who I don’t know), accuse me of “defeatism” and “sabotage” and express their grievances as follows:

“As a community, we must fight united for the expansion of all our fields of inquiry, working with the public and politicians to increase the research budget to accommodate different kinds of projects. While it is true that research budgets are often strained, our work is to convince society that what we do is worthwhile, even when it fails to deliver the big headlines.”

But no, just no. My job as a scientist is not to “convince society” that what other scientists do is worthwhile (regardless of headlines). My job is to look at the evidence and report what I find. The evidence says particle physicists’ methods for theory-development have not worked for four decades. Yet they continue using these methods. It’s bad science, it deserves to be called bad science, and I will continue to call it bad science until they stop doing it.

If I was a genius, I would be here telling you about my great new theory of everything. I don’t have one. I am a mediocre thinker. I just wish all those smart people would stop playing citation games and instead do their job so we would see some real progress. But I’m also a writer. Words are my weapons. And make no mistake, I’m not done.

Book Update

Yesterday, after some back-and-forth with a German customs officer, my husband finally got hold of a parcel that had gone astray. It turned out to contain 5 copies of the audio version of my book “Lost in Math.” UNABRIDGED. Read by Laura Jennings.

7 discs. 8 hours, 43 minutes. Produced by Brilliance Audio.

I don’t need 5 copies of this. Come to think of it, I don’t even have a CD player. So, I decided, I’ll give away two copies. Yes, all for free! I’ll even pay the shipping fee on your behalf.

All you have to do is leave a comment below, and explain why you are interested in the book. The CD-sets will go to the first two such commenters by time stamp of submission. And, to say the obvious, I cannot send a parcel to a pseudonym, so if you are interested, you must be willing to provide a shipping address.

Ready, set, go.

Update: The books are gone!

Letter from a reader: “What’s so bad about randomness?”

[The best part of publishing a book has been getting feedback from readers who report their own experience as it relates to what I wrote about. With permission, I want to share this letter which I received the other day from Dave Hurwitz, a classical music critic.]

Dear Dr. Hossenfelder,

I hope that I am not bothering you, but I just wanted to write to tell you how much I am enjoying your book “Lost in Math.” I haven’t quite finished it yet, but I was so taken with it that I thought I might write to let you know anyway. I am about as far away from theoretical physics as it’s possible to be: I am a classical music critic and independent musical scholar, and I support myself working in real estate; but I am a very serious follower of the popular scientific literature, and I was so impressed by your directness, literacy, and ability to make complex topics digestible and entertaining for the general reader.

I am also very much in sympathy with your point of view. Even though I don’t understand the math, it often seems to me that so much of what theoretical physicists are doing amounts to little more than a sort of high-end gematria – numerology with a kind of mystical value assigned to mathematical coincidence or consistency, or, as you (they) call it, “beauty.” I cringe whenever I hear these purely aesthetic judgments applied to theoretical speculation about the nature of reality, based primarily on the logic of the underlying math. And don’t get me wrong: I like math. Personally, I have no problem with the idea that the laws governing the universe may not be elegant and tidy, and I see no reason why they should be. They are what they are, and that’s all. What’s so bad about randomness? It’s tough enough trying to figure out what they are without assigning to them purely subjective moral or aesthetic values (or giving these undue weight in guiding the search).

It may interest you to know that something similar seems to be infecting current musicology, and I am sure many other academic fields. Discussion of specific musical works often hinges on standardized and highly technical versions of harmonic analysis, mostly because the language and methodology have been systematized and everyone agrees on how to do it – but what it actually means, how it creates meaning or expressiveness, is anyone’s guess. It is assumed to be important, but there is no demonstrable causal connection between the correctness of the analysis and the qualitative values assigned to it. It all comes down to a kind of circular reasoning: the subjective perception of “beauty” drives the search for a coherent musical substructure which, not surprisingly, once described is alleged to justify the original assumption of “beauty.” If you don’t “get” physicists today, then I don’t “get” musicologists.

Anyway, I’m sorry to take up so much of your time, but I just wanted to note that what you see – the kind of reasoning that bothers you so much – has its analogues way beyond the field of theoretical physics. I take your point that scientists, perhaps, should know better, but the older I get the more I realize two things: first, human nature is the same everywhere, and second, as a consequence, it’s precisely the people who ought to know better that, for the most part, seldom do. I thank you once again for making your case so lucidly and incisively.

Best regards,

Dave Hurwitz
ClassicsToday.com

Happy Holidays

I have been getting a novel complaint about my music videos, which is that they are “hard to understand.” In case you share this impression, you may be overthinking this. These aren’t press-releases about high-temperature superconductors or neutron star matter, it’s me attempting to sing. But since you ask, this one is about the – often awkward – relation between science and religion.



(Soundcloud version here.)

And since tis the season, allow me to mention that you find a donate-button in the top right corner of this website. On this occasion I also wish to express a heart-felt THANK YOU for all of those who this year sent donations. I very much appreciate your support, no matter how small, because it documents that you value my writing.

And here is this years’ family portrait for the Christmas cards.

In Germany, we traditionally celebrate Christmas on the evening of December 24th. So I herewith sign off for the rest of the year. Wish you all Happy Holidays.

Dear Dr B: What do you actually live from?

Some weeks ago a friend emailed me to say he was shocked – shocked! – to hear I had lost my job. This sudden unemployment was news to me, but not as big a surprise as you may think. I was indeed unemployed for two months last year, not because I said rude things about other people’s theories, but simply because someone forgot to renew my contract. Or maybe I forgot to ask that it be renewed. Or both.

In any case, this happened a few times before, and while my younger self wouldn’t normally let such a brilliant opportunity for outrage go to waste, I now like to pretend that I am old and wise and breathe out bullshit.

After some breathing, I learned that this time my sudden unemployment originated not in a forgotten signature, but on Wikipedia. I missed the ensuing kerfuffle about my occupation, but later someone sent me a glorious photoshopped screenshot (see above) which shows me with a painted-on mustache and informs us that Sabine Hossenfelder is known for “a horrible blog on which she makes fun of other people’s theories.”

The truly horrible thing about this blog, however, is that I’m not making fun. String theorists are happily studying universes that don’t exist, particle physicists are busy inventing particles that no one ever measures, and theorists mass-produce “solutions” to the black hole information loss problem that no one will ever be able to test. All these people get paid well for their remarkable contributions to human knowledge. If that makes you laugh, it’s the absurdity of the situation, not my blog, that’s funny.

Be that as it may, I have given a lot of interviews in the past months and noticed people are somewhat confused about what I actually work on. I didn’t write about my current research in my book because inevitably the physicists I criticize would have complained I wrote the book merely to advertise my own work. So now they just complain that I wrote the book, period. Or they complain I’m a horrible person. Which is probably correct because, you see, all that bullshit I’ve been breathing out now sticks to them.

Horrible person that I am, I don’t even work in the foundations of physics any more. I now work on quantum simulations or, more specifically, on using weakly coupled condensed-matter-systems to obtain information about a different, strongly coupled condensed matter system.

The relation between the two systems stems from a combination of analogue gravity with the gauge-gravity duality. The neat thing about this is that – in contrast to either the gauge-gravity duality or analogue gravity alone – we are dealing with two systems that can (at least in principle) be prepared in the laboratory. It’s about the real world!

This opens the possibility to experimentally test the validity of the gauge-gravity duality, or its applicability to certain systems, respectively. Current experiments (like Jeff Steinhauer’s) aren’t precise enough to actually do this, but the technology in this area is rapidly improving, so I’m hopeful that maybe in a decade or so it’ll be doable.

If that was too much terminology, I’m developing new methods to describe how large numbers of atoms interact at very low temperature.

Today, Tobias Zingg and I have a new paper on the arXiv that sums up our recent results. And that’s what I’ll be working on until my contract runs out for real, in November next year. And then what? I don’t know, but stay tuned and we’ll find out.

Away Note

I’ll be traveling the next two weeks. First I am in Santa Fe, giving both a colloquium and a public lecture, and then I am in Oslo, giving two talks, one at the Kavli Symposium and one at the public library.

Later in September I’ll be in London at HowTheLightGetsIn. The first week of October, I’ll be in NYC and afterwards in Lexington, Kentucky. The week after that I’ll be at the international book fair in Frankfurt, and in early November I’ll be in Berlin (details to come).

I have been advised that giving talks about my book is private business, so please note that the next two weeks I am officially on vacation for the first time since 2008 (which was our two-years-late honeymoon trip).

Vacation or not, it is foreseeable that I will be offline for extended periods, so please prepare for a slow time on this blog.

Lost in Math: Out Now.

Today is the official publication date of my book “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.” There’s an interview with me in the current issue of “Der Spiegel” (in German) with a fancy photo, and an excerpt at Scientific American.

In the book I don’t say much about myself or my own research. I felt that was both superfluous and not particularly interesting. However, a lot of people have asked me about a comment I made in the passing in an earlier blogpost: “By writing [this book], I waived my hopes of ever getting tenure.” Even the Spiegel-guy who interviewed me asked about this! So I feel like I should add some explanation here to prevent misunderstandings. I hope you excuse that this will be somewhat more personal than my usual blogposts.

I am not tenured and I do not have a tenure-track position, so not like someone threatened me. I presently have a temporary contract which will run out next year. What I should be doing right now is applying for faculty positions. Now imagine you work at some institution which has a group in my research area. Everyone is happily producing papers in record numbers, but I go around and say this is a waste of money. Would you give me a job? You probably wouldn’t. I probably wouldn’t give me a job either.

That’s what prompted my remark, and I think it is a realistic assessment. But please note that the context in which I wrote this wasn’t a sudden bout of self-pity, it was to report a decision I made years ago.

I know you only get to see the results now, but I sold the book proposal in 2015. In the years prior to this, I was shortlisted for some faculty positions. In the end that didn’t pan out, but the interviews prompted me to imagine the scenario in which I actually got the job. And if I was being honest to myself, I didn’t like the scenario.

I have never been an easy fit to academia. I guess I was hoping I’d grow into it, but with time my fit has only become more uneasy. At some point I simply concluded I have had enough of this nonsense. I don’t want to be associated with a community which wastes tax-money because its practitioners think they are morally and intellectually so superior that they cannot possibly be affected by cognitive biases. You only have to read the comments on this blog to witness the origin of the problem, as with commenters who work in the field laughing off the idea that their objectivity can possibly be affected by working in echo-chambers. I can’t even.

As to what I’ll do when my contract runs out, I don’t know. As everyone who has written popular science books will confirm, you don’t get rich from it. The contract with Basic Books would never have paid for the actual working time, and that was before my agent got his share and the tax took its bite. (And while I am already publicly answering questions about my income, I also frequently get asked how much “money” I make with the ads on this blog. It’s about one dollar a day. Really the ads are only there so I don’t feel like I am writing here entirely for nothing.)

What typically happens when I write about my job situation is that everyone offers me advice. This is very kind, but I assure you I am not writing this because I am asking for help. I will be fine, do not worry about me. Yes, I don’t know what I’ll do next year, but something will come to my mind.

What needs help isn’t me, but academia: The current organization amplifies rather than limits the pressure to work on popular and productive topics. If you want to be part of the solution, the best starting point is to read my book.

Thanks for listening. And if you still haven’t had enough of me, Tam Hunt has an interview with me up at Medium. You can leave comments on this interview here.

More info on the official book website: lostinmathbook.com

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.”