I guess that it is better to read this book rather than listen to it. As a nonphycisist and a layperson I had really hard time to grasp the content to its full extent as it is fairly technical and listening to it on my walks to an office only amplified the problem (my bad). Due to that, much of the particularities in the book - the 'physics stuff' - may very well have been lost on me (perhaps I would re-read it in the future), though I think I got the main message.

The author claims throughout the book that, as both its title and subtitle suggest, the contemporary physics (and maybe event the whole scientific method itself) experiences severe difficulties nowadays as modern theories cannot be easily tested experimentally (millions of dollars have been invested in the past so that the LHC was built and are currently being deployed once again so that even larger collider is construed). The traditional method well-established over the centuries now seems to have reached its limits. This is where the mathematics come in to lead the way in theory development. Sabine Hossenfelder argues that much of the contemporary theories, untesteable in their very nature, rely on mathematics and somewhat vague notion of beauty. Furthermore, Hossenfelder argues, the notion of beauty or elegance was incorporated in our (or physicists') thinking so deep so that it had been lost in math.

Hossefelder then departs on the journey to interview many physicists to find out how wide-spread is the notion of beauty in physics, or to perhaps find some deep truth behind it all, only to find out that there is none (at least that was my perception of it). At the end of the book, the author suggests some of the concepual approaches to the research in (perhaps not only) physics; though as she herself expressed, there possibly is not an easy way out. schovat popis