And our “truth = beauty” conviction seems to rest on cherry-picked anecdotes.

A lot of the beauty narrative is just that-narrative.

It’s worth asking why we find such a connection, and if the link says more about the universe, or about our unreliable perceptions of beauty. The “beauty = truth” dogma isn’t a priori obvious. I could belabor until the end of eternal inflation how unfortunate it is that we don’t live in a complex manifold of dimension six because calculus in such spaces is considerably more beautiful than in the real space we have to deal with, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Mathematics is full of amazing and beautiful things, and most of them do not describe the world. “Such a connection between me and the universe seems very mystical, very romantic, very not me.” Later, on page 189, she elaborates: “Why should the laws of nature care what I find beautiful?” she writes on page 3.

There’s no reason to think nature cares what we find beautiful.Plus, the writing is great-a delicious mix of journalistic balance and iconoclastic snark. (Less, in fact they, at least, reach birdfeeders via daring feats of applied mechanics.) Still, I found the book accessible, informative, and compellingly argued. In her new book Lost in Math, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder lofts a very skeptical eyebrow at this orthodoxy.Ĭonfession: I know about as much physics as the average squirrel. Gazing at the universe will always satisfy your aesthetic itch-and if not, then you probably suck at gazing. They go together, inextricable, like friendship and laughter, or road work and traffic.

It’s an old, familiar idea: Truth is beauty.

Lost in math