Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder. Basic Books, June 2018. Reviewed by Steven Willing, MD ________________ “Physical laws should have mathematical beauty”. Paul Dirac, Nobel Laureate* ___________________ Way back in 1973, the world of theoretical physics reached a dead end. That year marked the last successful prediction of any elemental particles - the top and bottom quarks - which were experimentally verified in 1995 and 1977 respectively. (The Higgs boson, finally detected in 2012, had been predicted in the 1960’s). Since then, there has been no successful prediction that would supersede the standard model.
