sabine hossenfelder existential physics review

Is there really a stylistic homology between modernist mathematics and modernist art and literature? If so, can the history of modernist mathematics shed new light on the phenomenon of literary modernism? Though the history of modernist mathematics offers a useful resource for interpreting some of the invocations of mathematics in modernist literature, I argue that modern literature’s engagement with mathematics cannot wholly be explained by reference to modernist mathematics. Jeremy Gray’s recent account of modernism in mathematics poses a challenge for the study of literary modernism. I place literary treatments of mathematics in dialogue with the versions of mathematics constructed by mathematicians in their prose works (manifestos, historiography, apologias and memoirs). Through readings of Samuel Beckett, Robert Musil, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Wyndham Lewis, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Jacques Roubaud and others, I trace modern literature’s engagement with the symbolic and affective economy of quantification and with the cultural history of mathematics. I examine the work that mathematics does in a range of literary texts produced in the quantified world of the twentieth century: produced after Ian Hacking’s ‘avalanche of printed numbers’ – in the era, as Alain Badiou puts it, ‘of number’s despotism’. This thesis offers an account of what it means for literature to be woven with mathematics and for mathematics to be part of the history of style. Although in recent years there has been a growing critical interest in the intersection of literature and mathematics and in the cultural history of mathematisation, the work is just beginning. Anyone capable of bridging the concerns of the human world and the baffling complexities of physics has earned the right to be indulged a little.Mary Poovey remarks that for the literary critic ‘numbers constitute something like the last frontier of representation’. Hossenfelder is sometimes a little too opinionated, the reader will quickly forgive her.

an informed and entertaining guide to what science can and cannot tell us. Hossenfelder breaks up her text with four interviews with physicists to provide 'other voices.' Their main effect is to confirm stereotypes of eccentricity. Hossenfelder doesn’t apply the distinction between unscientific and ascientific consistently, sometimes giving both labels to the same idea. The most surprising and interesting feature of the book is the claim that many of her physicist peers are as guilty of bringing speculation and belief into their scientific thinking as theologians and New Age mystics. She is less persuasive when she encroaches on philosophical territory, brusquely brushing aside the possibility of free will. Hossenfelder can mostly avoid straying beyond science because the questions she addresses are more metaphysical than existential.

Sabine hossenfelder existential physics review