As AI types like to say, the system is so easily fooled because it doesn’t “know” anything. We are slowly learning, in consequence, more about what it means for a human being to “know” something.
Tag: Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine Hossenfelder dusts off “superdeterminism”
Hossenfelder: “Now, a lot of people discard superdeterminism simply because they prefer to believe in free will, which is where I think the biggest resistance to superdeterminism comes from.”
Particle physics is a mess but Hossenfelder should chill, fellow physicist says
Hmmm. He’s not giving fellow physicists much of an incentive to sort out the mess. On the other hand, civilized theoretical physicists fight so politely that you can learn a lot just by listening.
The multiverse is just religion, theoretical physicist charges
Of course she’s right about the religion part. Much that is going wrong with science today is the tendency to use various science ideas as secular religions. The multiverse happens to be a particularly devastating one because it strikes at the very idea of evidence.
Sabine Hossenfelder: Don’t expect too much from new proposals to detect dark matter
She doesn’t so much oppose it as she doesn’t want to “wait another 40 years for physicists to realize that falsifiability alone is not sufficient to make a hypothesis promising.” In any event, those who remember science from fifty or thirty years ago find this state of affairs odd.
Sabine Hossenfelder summarizes multiverse theories, asks: Science or fiction?
With respect to the simulation multiverse: Why could there not be countless, helplessly infinite, simulations of the simulations as well?
What does it mean to say, in physics, that something like the Higgs boson “exists”?
Sabine Hossenfelder’s view: Realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.
Sabine Hossenfelder: Black holes vs. quantum mechanics = something has to give
Her view: Most physicists believe that the solution is that the Hawking radiation somehow must contain information after all.
When particle physicists collide, some are transformed into children
My, my. A commenter formed the correct impression and suggests, “Could you please answer the very valid questions raised by Sabine [Hossenfelder] instead of smearing her like this?”
Sabine Hossenfelder: “We know that quantum mechanics is wrong.”
Do we know that quantum mechanics is wrong and, if so, how can it be useful?
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor: Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is really confused about free will
It really is quite funny. And physicists should stick to physics.
Sabine Hossenfelder on the flight from falsifiability
Hossenfelder is right to be concerned. Some cosmologists would like to dump falsifiability as a criterion. If they could, they would remove an obstacle to demanding public belief in ideas like the multiverse, ideas that cannot be falsified because there is no evidence for them.
Do science hero stories stand in the way of progress?
Sabine Hossenfelder thinks that in fundamental physics the problem is not a shortage of smart people but a shortage of smart people who grasp that they are simply “wheels in the machinery.”
Have quantum physics’ problems been disgracefully swept under the carpet?
Possibly, but maybe it’s inherently fuzzy. Meanwhile, an update on Adam Becker’s attack on Inference Review as an ID-friendly rag; Peter Woit and Sabine Hossenfelder weigh in.
Sabine Hossenfelder: Has the Large Hadron Collider “broken physics”?
Question: Who decided that physics had to be “natural”? What does that mean? And what if “naturalness” is not an attribute of the physics of our universe? What does that mean?