Seminars

Hamburg Photon Science Colloquium | How beauty leads physics astray

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

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

CFEL SR I-III (Bldg. 99)

DESY, Hamburg

Description

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.