Emmy Noether Can’t Get a Break

I had two intertwined purposes in writing my book¹ Einstein’s Tutor: to explain Noether’s Theorem to non-physicists, and to argue for the crucial role that Emmy Noether’s work played in the development of modern physics (hence the book’s subtitle: “The story of Emmy Noether and the invention of modern physics).

In this latter purpose I was, and am, fighting against the grain of the way that the history of 20^th century physics is usually described. The standard story suppresses Noether’s contributions, and instead of tracing the history of some central ideas in physics to their origins in her work, gives the credit to various men.

The latest perpetrator of this distorted history is Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, who, in a recent video,² says “Sometimes mathematicians have taken their inspiration from physics, such as Hermann Weyl, who invented gauge symmetries”.

I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about the invention of gauge symmetries any more than it would be to talk about the “invention” of the isotropy of space. These things are properties of nature. But the concept of a gauge field, the elucidation of what gauge symmetry is, and the consequences for a physical system that evinces such symmetry, all appear for the first time³ in Emmy Noether’s 1918 paper⁴ where she proved her famous results now known collectively as “Noether’s Theorem”.

Giving credit for these things to the great Hermann Weyl carries a whiff of unwelcome irony. For Weyl was one of the few men who did give credit to Noether, both during her life and after her far too early death, while he built⁵ upon her ideas in building up the foundations of modern particle physics (along with others, or course, such as Heisenberg).

This is in glaring contrast with, for example, Einstein, who, while acknowledging Noether’s extensive help and tutelage in his private letters, omitted any mention of her (or of the others who helped him) when publishing his papers on General Relativity. (If you want the details, there is a certain book⁶ that I am happy to recommend.)

Dr. Hossenfelder has it backwards about Weyl. His work applying gauge symmetry was not mathematics taking inspiration from physics; while trained as a mathematician, his interest in physics was deep and life-long, and here as elsewhere was thoroughly engaged as a mathematical physicist. In fact the work that he took inspiration from was generated by the purest of pure mathematicians, someone who had no interest in physics, who published her paper as a one-off, to help her colleagues understand issues that arose from General Relativity. The fact that this paper changed the course of physics would have held scant interest to Emmy Noether, even had she survived to see it happen. It would be more accurate to say that Weyl was inspired by a piece of pure mathematics to explore its consequences for physics.

I have no animus toward Sabine Hossenfelder, and in fact referred to and recommended two of her videos in my book.⁷ I find her courageous criticism of the decay spreading through areas of recent theoretical physics rare and valuable. I only wish that more people with a large audience would depart more often from the conventional narrative when educating the public.