How Politics And Beauty Leads Physics Astray - Sabine Hossenfelder - #028

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. This week, I am talking to a theoretical physicist. Bit of a departure from my usual sort of guests, which is very interesting. Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist, blogger and author. Her most recent book, Lost in Math, How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, talks about physicists' obsession with beautiful theories. And how this is potentially leading to a restriction in progress for physics overall. Now, it sounds like quite a nebulous and difficult to define area, and it turns out that it actually is. But we do a pretty good job of working out just what is happening in the physics world at the moment. What I found particularly interesting was discovering just how much politics influences physics. To get your research funded, what the hurdles are that you need to jump through and whose rings you need to kiss in order to be supported. It seems very contradictory to think that a scientific subject area requires people to play a game akin to what you would presume in Wall Street, where you're sticking to the right kinds of rhetorics and you're pushing the correct narrative coming from the right educational background, coming from the right conceptual theoretical background. Really, really interesting. And it was a whole world that I didn't even know existed. So here we go.
Sabine Hossenfelder, how are you today?

**Sabine Hossenfelder** (2:08)
I'm doing fine, how are you?

**Chris Williamson** (2:09)
Very good, thank you. Where are you in the world at the moment?

**Sabine Hossenfelder** (2:13)
I'm in Heidelberg, that's like 100 kilometers south of Frankfurt.

**Chris Williamson** (2:19)
Oh, very nice indeed, very nice. So I wanna get straight into it. You will be the first physicist which we've featured on the podcast. So the weight of the entire world of physics is resting on your shoulders at the moment. I wanna ask a really fundamental question. It's been a really long time since we've seen major breakthroughs in physics, you know, global newsworthy breakthroughs. Is there a reason why that's the case?

**Sabine Hossenfelder** (2:51)
Well, one of the reasons is probably that you're reading the wrong news.
There have been a lot of breakthroughs in physics. What I'm mostly concerned with are really the foundations of physics. So the biggest breakthroughs in physics are the ones that the Nobel Prizes are getting handed out for, and you find a list of that on the website of the Nobel Prize Academy. But I'm really talking about the foundations of physics. And there you are right, it has been a really long time since there has been a breakthrough where we have discovered something really new. I mean, the stuff that has made headlines, like say that the direct detection of gravitational waves, or neutrino masses, neutrino oscillation and so on and so forth. These are all ideas that go back at least 30, 40, in some cases, 100 years.

**Chris Williamson** (3:40)
So this is physical proof of something which theoretically has been around for a little while?

**Sabine Hossenfelder** (3:47)
Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (3:48)
Okay. So is it a case at all that there's less stuff to discover, in quotation marks? Are we mapping so much of physics that the remaining dark spots on the map are limited? Or is it something to do with the approach that physicists have got at the moment? Or is there a sticking block or a glass ceiling that we've hit?

**Sabine Hossenfelder** (4:12)
Well, that's a very good question, but how would I know?
How would I know what is still left to discover? What I can tell you is that we have already discovered a lot, and that just means that the easy things have been done. The stuff that you can measure in your little laboratory with your handheld equipment and so on, it's just that's all been done. That's the case in experiment. It's also the case in theory development. The easy things have been tried. So it's kind of natural to expect that it will become more difficult. Then on balance to that though, we also now have a lot of more people working on it. So that should help, but apparently it doesn't. So we have, at least in the foundations of physics, we have had the mathematical structure of the theories that we're using right now since the mid 1970s.

**Chris Williamson** (5:06)
Okay, so the low-hanging fruit to one degree or another, as low-hanging as physics can get, I suppose, has been gathered to a large degree. Would you say that's fair?

**Sabine Hossenfelder** (5:18)
Yeah, certainly.

**Chris Williamson** (5:19)
Okay.
So what is the current sticking point that we've got at the moment? Is it technological? Is it that the instrumentation that we're using? Is it the minds? As you say, there's more people than ever are dedicating their efforts towards physics. Are they looking in the wrong place?