Hi friends. This week I am talking to a theoretical physicist, a bit of a departure from my usual

sort of guests, which is very interesting. Sabina Hassenfelder is a theoretical physicist,

blogger and author. Her most recent book, Lost in Math, How Beauty Leads Physics Estray,

talks about physicist's obsession with beautiful theories and how this is potentially leading

to a restriction in progress for physics overall. It sounds like quite a nebulous and difficult

to define area and it turns out that it actually is, but we do a pretty good job of working

out just what is happening in the physics world at the moment. What I found particularly

interesting was discovering just how much politics influences physics to get your research funded,

what the hurdles are that you need to jump through and who's rings you need to kiss in order to

be supported. It seems very contradictory to think that a scientific subject area requires people

to play a game akin to what you would presume in Wall Street where you're sticking to the right

kinds of rhetoric and you're pushing the correct narrative coming from the right educational

background coming from the right conceptual theoretical background. Really, really interesting.

And it was a whole world that I didn't even know existed. So here we go.

Sabina Hassanfelder, how are you today? I'm doing fine, how are you? Very good, thank you. Where are you in the world at the moment?

I'm in Heidelberg that's like 100 kilometers south of Frankfurt.

Oh, very nice indeed, very nice. So I want to get straight into it. You will be the first physicist

which we've featured on the podcast. So the weight of the entire world of physics is resting on

your computer at the moment. I want to ask a really fundamental question. It's been a really long time

since we've seen major breakthroughs in physics. Global newsworthy breakthroughs.

Is there a reason why that's the case?

Well, one of the reasons is probably that you're reading the wrong news.

...