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Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Basic Books, 2018, 304 pages, $17.99 (hardcover).

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References

  1. Thomas Kuhn, “Objectivity, Value Judgment and Theory Choice,” in The Essential Tension, 320–39 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), on 333f.

  2. James McAllister, Beauty and Revolution in Science (Cornell University Press, 1999).

  3. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong (London: Vintage Books, 2006).

  4. Porter Williams, “Naturalness, the Autonomy of Scales and the 125 GeV Higgs,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 51 (2015), 82–96, esp. sections 3–4; “Two Notions of Naturalness,” Foundations of Physics Online (2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-018-0229-1.

  5. Aristotle, De Anima, trans. J. A Smith (350 BCE; Cambridge, MA: The Internet Classics Archive, 2009), http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.html, book 2, ch. 7, 418b21–26.

  6. Williams, “Naturalness” (ref. 4), sections 2–3; “Two Notions” (ref. 4), section 2.

  7. Washington Taylor and Yi-Nan Wang, “The F-Theory Geometry with Most Flux Vacua,” Journal of High Energy Physics 12 (2015), 1–21.

  8. Feraz Azhar and Jeremy Butterfield, “Scientific Realism and Primordial Cosmology,” arXiv, June 13, 2016, http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04071. Abridged in The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism, ed. J. Saatsi (London: Routledge, 2018).

  9. George Ellis and Joe Silk, “Defend the Integrity of Physics,” Nature 516 (2014), 321–23; this paper also discusses string theory.

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  11. Jim Hartle and Thomas Hertog, “The Observer Strikes Back,” in The Philosophy of Cosmology, ed. K. Chamcham, J. Silk, J. Barrow and S. Saunders, 181–205 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 182; Frank Wilczek, “Enlightenment, Knowledge, Ignorance, Temptation,” in Universe or Multiverse?, ed. B. Carr, 43–54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 43.

  12. Steven Weinberg, “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant,” Physical Review Letters 59, no. 22 (1987), 2607–10, esp. 2607–8. See also his paper, “The Cosmological Constant Problem,” Reviews of Modern Physics 61, no. 1 (1989), 1– 23, on 7.

  13. See Hugo Martel, Paul Shapiro, and Steven Weinberg, “Likely Values of the Cosmological Constant,” Astrophysical Journal 492, no. 1 (1997), 29–40. This built on previous work, such as Weinberg, “Anthropic Bound” (ref. 12). Alex Vilenkin “Anthropic Predictions: The Case of the Cosmological Constant,” in Carr, Universe or Multiverse? (ref. 11), 163–80, is a fine review of the conceptual issues.

  14. Peter Woit, “On Status of KKLT,” Not Even Wrong, accessed January 15, 2019, http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10486.

  15. “Why Trust a Theory: Program,” Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.whytrustatheory2015.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/program/index.html.

  16. Richard Dawid, String Theory and the Scientific Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. ch. 3.

  17. John Bell, “Against Measurement,” in 62 Years of Uncertainty: Erice 5–14 August 1989 (New York: Plenum, 1989); reprinted in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2004), 213–31.

  18. Weinberg’s frank admission of the problem is developed in his 2017 article, “The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics,” New York Review of Books, January 19, 2017; available at: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/.

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Acknowledgements

For comments and corrections to previous versions, I am very grateful to: Feraz Azhar, Guido Bacciagaluppi, Alex Chamolly, Richard Dawid, George Ellis, Henrique Gomes, Sabine Hossenfelder, Joe Martin, Porter Williams, and especially Sebastian De Haro.

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Correspondence to Jeremy Butterfield.

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Jeremy Butterfield is a Senior Research Fellow in philosophy of physics at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

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Butterfield, J. Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Basic Books, 2018, 304 pages, $17.99 (hardcover).. Phys. Perspect. 21, 63–86 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-019-00233-0

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