ABSTRACT

To develop fundamentally new laws of nature, theoretical physicists often rely on arguments from beauty. Simplicity and naturalness in particular have been strongly influential guides in the foundations of physics ever since the development of the standard model of particle physics. In this lecture I argue that arguments from beauty have led the field into a dead end and discuss what can be done about it.

About the Speaker:

Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in physics and a Bachelor's degree in mathematics. She is presently a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany, and has published more than 80 research articles about the foundations of physics.

Sabine has also written about physics for a broad audience for 15 years and is creator of the popular YouTube channel "Science without the Gobbledygook". Her writing has been published, among others, in New Scientist, Scientific American, the New York Times, and The Guardian. Her second book "Existential Physics" was published in August 2022.