Come and see Micho Kaku and Sabine Hossenfelder LIVE next weekend at HowTheLightGetsIn London (23rd-24th September). They'll be debating topics from the Standard Model to gravity and time, at the world's largest philosophy and music festival.

Get tickets here: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festiva...

Sabine Hossenfelder, Michio Kaku, Juan Maldacena and Max Tegmark debate beauty, fantasy, faith, and physics.

We think that we pursue the sciences solely for knowledge and truth. But is this a mistake? Untestable ideals like beauty have been baked into theories throughout the history of science. Paul Dirac, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, proclaimed "it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." And recently, Roger Penrose described string theory as a 'fashion', quantum physics as a 'faith', and cosmic inflation a as 'fantasy', arguing that scientists suffer from the very same prejudices that affect the rest of us.

Do we pursue science for a pure desire for the truth? Or should we accept that some beliefs, especially in the foundations of physics, are akin to religious beliefs dressed in mathematical language to give our theories meaning? Or would seeing science as simply another theology undermine the field and the progress made over the past few centuries?

#michiokaku #sabinehossenfelder #physics

00:00 Introduction
03:06 Michio Kaku pitch
06:22 Sabine Hossenfelder pitch
08:32 Max Tegmark
11:07 Juan Maldacena
13:34 Is beauty more important than experimental data?
23:36 Are some assumptions in physics akin to religious tenets?
47:37 Will physics be undermined by untestable criteria?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist and science communicator who researches quantum gravity. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.

Michio Kaku has spent his career inspired by the search for a grand unifying theory of everything – carrying on Einstein’s quest to unite the four fundamental forces of nature. His latest book is Quantum Supremacy.

Juan Maldacena is the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. Due to his field-defining contributions to the foundations of string theory and quantum gravity, Leonard Susskind has called him “the greatest theoretical physicist of his generation.”

Max Tegmark is a pioneering physicist, cosmologist, computer scientist, philosopher, and public intellectual based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tegmark is the author of Our Mathematical Universe, which argues that reality is fundamentally a mathematical structure.

Hosted by Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Professor of Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University.

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