How Beauty Leads: A Community Lecture with Sabine Hossenfelder
To develop new laws of nature, physicists routinely rely on arguments from beauty. This method has worked badly and has resulted in 40 years of stagnation in the foundations of physics. Dozens of costly experiments were commissioned but failed to confirm any of physicists' beautiful hypotheses. In this talk, physicist and author Sabine Hossenfelder explains what physicists mean when they say a theory is beautiful, what went wrong with their reliance on it, and how the field can move on.
Hossenfelder will be signing copies of her recently published book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, in The Lensic Lobby at 6:45 pm.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a Ph.D. in physics and a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics. She is presently a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany, and has published more than 60 research articles about the foundations of physics.
Hossenfelder has written about physics for a broad audience for more than 10 years. Besides her popular blog Backreaction, she has also written for Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta Magazine, Aeon, NOVA, Nautilus, and NPR (among others). Her first book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray was published in June 2018 by Basic Books.
Reserve your free tickets online through the Lensic Box Office.
The SFI Community Lecture Series is generously underwritten by Thornburg Investment Management, with additional support from The Lensic Performing Arts Center and Enterprise Holdings Foundation.