Book Review: Lost in Math
5/5 stars
"Models are not data and predictions are not evidence."
*******
This is a brilliant book, and there's so much I don't think I'll ever be able to take it all in. (And I won't be rereading it for extra gleanings.)

And this is The Difficulty with many Pop Physics Books: People like the present reader have insufficient background in the subject (only two semesters of undergraduate Physics here), but want to understand it nonetheless. 

Even just to sit down and write a review and try to bring across the pertinent concepts requires the reader to be "in the zone."

How to explain such conceptually dense things to somebody like they are a 6-year-old?

The author has done a pretty good job, the difficulty of the task notwithstanding. 

And I have even managed to take away several new concepts from this text--even if I didn't fully understand many of them.

This book is also about the Philosophy of Science--But the author's full-throated defense of the Standard Model is the specific vehicle employed to illustrate several broad concepts in said Philosophy. (The fact that physicists don't like standard model and keep trying to come up with more beautiful theories that are never empirically verified is this author's bete noire.)

1. If you can't test it, is it science? 

2. What does it mean for a theory to be aesthetic? 

3. If a theory is "ugly,"  but it does correspond to experimental data..... What reason do you have to reject it in favor of a theory that is more mathematically elegant but does not do the same? (As used here, "ugly"  means that there are a large number of parameters in the Standard Model.)

4. "The final call is based on our success it explaining observation. But absent observational tests, the most important property of theory must have is to find approval by our peers." 

Factoids:

1. The number of physicists has increased by a factor of 100 over the last century. 

2. It's not quite like it was in the early days, where people waited until they had something to say to write something down. These days, it is more like publish - perish, it's the perverse incentive for proliferation of ideas for their own sake. And with a corresponding decrease in relevance per paper.

3. The difference between the energies that we could produce and what were needed to test things were about 25 orders of magnitude a century ago. These days, there's another 15 orders of magnitude to go.

We may never get there: apparently "If we wanted to reach Planckian energies, We would need a particle collider about the size of the Milky Way.  Or if we wanted to measure a quantum of the gravitational field - a gravitron - the detector would have to be the size of Jupiter and located not just anywhere but in orbit around a potent source of gravitrons, such as a neutron star."

4. Since there are so many ways to build a theory -- presently estimated at 10^500--The standard model is plausibly among them. But nobody has found it, and, given the huge number of possibilities, the odds are that nobody ever will.

*******
Some of the best quotes and germane points (for me to remember as well as that a reader of the review might find interesting). 

The author is talking about subdisciplines/concepts of Physics:

1. Particle physics 
2. Astrophysics 
3. Cosmology 
4. Quantum foundations 
5. Phenomenology 
6. Quantum mechanics
7. String theory
8. Quantum chromodynamics
9. Calabi Yau manifolds 
10.Loop quantum gravity
11. Perturbation theory
12.Quantum Gravity

Quotes:

1. The closest you will get to an answer is following the trail of facts down into the basement of science. Follow it until facts get sparse and your onward journey is blocked by theoreticians arguing whose theory is prettier. That's when you know you've reached the foundations. 

2. Math keeps us honest. It prevents us from lying to ourselves and to each other. You can be wrong with math, but you can't lie. 
3. For the most part, physicists and mathematicians have settled on a fine division of labor in which the former complain about the finickness of the latter and the latter complain about the sloppiness of the former.

4. We first demonstrate that a new theory agrees with the well-confirmed old theories to within measurement precision, thus reproducing the old theory's achievements. Then we only have to add calculations for what more the new theory can explain. 

5. The known particles are of two different types, fermions and bosons, and supersymmetry explains how these two types belong together. 

6. As a physicist, I'm often accused of reductionism, is if that were an optional position to hold. 
7. Being fundamental is a matter of current knowledge. What is fundamental today might no longer be fundamental tomorrow. What is emergent, however, will remain emergent.

8. How math connects to reality is a mystery that plagued philosophers long before they were scientists, and we aren't any wiser today. But luckily we can use the math without solving the mystery.

9. I can't believe what this once-venerable profession has become. Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed. And they're not even good at that.

10. The last time we had a theory of everything was 2,500 years ago..... The world was made up of four elements: Earth, water, air, and fire. Explaining everything was never so easy again.

11. I went into Physics because I don't understand human behavior. Two decades later, what prevents me from understanding Physics is that I still don't understand human behavior.

12. My life aspirations were those of the middle class, middle European family I come from: a good job, a nice house, a child or two, a cozy retirement, and a tasteful urn. 

13. How patently absurd it must appear to someone who last had contact with Physics in 11th grade that people get paid for ideas like that. But then, I think, people also get paid for throwing balls through hoops.

14. There's yet another way to postulate new Physics and then hide it, which is to introduce fields that become relevant only at very long distances or very early in the universe, both of which are hard to test.

15. Like many theoretical physicists, I once considered switching to economics in the hope of better job opportunities. I wasn't impressed by the math, but I was stunned by the lack of data.

16. The inconsistency of special relativity with Newtonian gravity gave rise to general relativity. The inconsistency between special relativity and quantum mechanics led to quantum field theory.

17. Three lessons: a) If you want to solve a problem with math, first make sure it really is a problem; b) State your assumptions; c) observational guidance is necessary. 

18. 500 theories to explain a signal that wasn't and 193 models for the early universe are more than enough evidence that current quality standards are no longer useful to assess our theories. To select promising future experiments, we need new rules.

******
Verdict: Recommended at the second hand price

Additional noteworthy concepts:

1. Symmetry: If the sky looks blue in every direction, then that dependence on direction is called a rotational symmetry. "The symmetries that physicists deal with are more abstract versions of this example, like rotations among multiple axes in internal mathematical spaces. But it always works the same way: find a transformation into which the laws of symmetry remain invariant, and you've found a symmetry."

2. Apophenia: liking to discover patterns in noise

3. Irvin Yalom (1980) describes four major “ultimate concerns”: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom.