Lecture by Sabine Hossenfelder

Throughout history, many scientific equations have been deemed beautiful, harmonious, or elegant. In Sabine Hossenfelder’s opinion, this use of adjectives shows that theoretical physicists often rely on arguments based on beauty when developing fundamentally new laws of nature. She suggests that simplicity and naturalness have been a particularly influential guide in particle physics research and, in her opinion, that arguments from beauty have led the field into a dead end of sterile debate. In this lecture she will explain why the paradigm of beauty has caused research in theoretical physics to fail and will discuss what can be done about it.