The Soggy Spaniel

It is early spring of 1943. The Axis powers are beginning to crumble against the massive and unrelenting Allied onslaught. Plans for the imminent invasion of Sicily are underway, establishing a base for the invasion and liberation of continental Europe. Meanwhile, back at US military intelligence, a tightly knit group of outliers have been poring over captured Nazi military communications. They conclude that Berlin is a Potemkin facade – the entire brain trust of the Nazi war machine is hiding away in the Canary Islands. “That is their true vulnerability,” they determine. "Capture the Canaries, and victory is assured."

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.