Hamburg Photon Science Colloquium | How beauty leads physics astray

by Sabine Hossenfelder (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

Friday 5 Jul 2019, 14:00 → 15:30 Europe/Berlin

CFEL SR I-III (Bldg. 99) (DESY, Hamburg)

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.