These ideas are highly controversial and yet exceedingly popular, speculative yet intriguing, pretty yet useless. They have concocted mind-boggling new theories, like the idea that our universe is but one of infinitely many that together form a “multiverse.” They have invented dozens of new particles, declared that we are projections of a higher-dimensional space, and that space is spawned by wormholes that tie together distant places. But my generation has been stunningly unsuccessful.Īfter twenty years in theoretical physics, most people I know make a career by studying things nobody has seen. In the last century, this division of labor between theorists and experimentalists worked very well. We inspect the cracks, the suspicious shortcomings in existing theories, and when we find ourselves onto something, we call for experimentalists to unearth deeper layers. In the temple of knowledge, we are the ones digging in the basement, probing the foundations. I am one of some ten thousand researchers whose task is to improve our theories of particle physics. I invent new laws of nature it’s what I do for a living.
I talk to friends and colleagues, see I’m not the only one confused, and set out to bring reason back to Earth. In which I realize I don’t understand physics anymore. But it is also the story of many other physicists who struggle with the same tension: we believe the laws of nature are beautiful, but is not believing something a scientist must not do? It is my own story, a reflection on the use of what I was taught. Lost in Math is the story of how aesthetic judgment drives contemporary research. Whatever laws of nature govern our universe, they’re not what physicists thought they were. Strip away equations and technical terms and physics becomes a quest for meaning-a quest that has taken an unexpected turn. But for a book about math, this book contains very little math. Theoretical physics is the stereotypical math-heavy, hard-to-understand discipline. Now Nature spoke, and she said nothing, loud and clear. They thought they could hear her whisper when they were talking to themselves. They believed that Mother Nature was elegant, simple, and kind about providing clues.
What failed physicists wasn’t their math it was their choice of math. The experiments didn’t reveal anything new. But where physicists expected a breakthrough, the ground wouldn’t give. The world prepared to ramp up the physics envy. They built accelerators, shot satellites into space, and planted detectors in underground mines. For decades physicists told us they knew where the next discoveries were waiting. T HEY WERE so sure, they bet billions on it.
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