At least some media types noticed that such a claim is pretty far out. Maybe they don’t “Trust the Science” like they should?
Tag: Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine Hossenfelder on the physics discoveries that make the headlines and then just disappear
Exotic particles that don’t survive a news cycle. She shows how they’re artifacts of the fact that very large numbers often show what appear to be patterns but are just noise.
How Sabine Hossenfelder’s opinion of dark matter has changed over 20 years
She thinks the solution now is to combine dark matter with modified gravity. Now that will be a challenge. We kind of wish she would go back to denying free will and fine-tuning of the universe.
Sabine Hossenfelder: Does the universe have higher dimensions?
Hossenfelder: If one adds 7 dimensions of space to our normal three dimensions, then one can describe all of the fundamental forces of nature geometrically. And that sounds like a really promising idea for a unified theory of physics. Indeed, in the early 1980s, the string theorist Edward Witten thought it was intriguing that seven additional dimensions of space is also the maximum for supergravity. However, that numerical coincidence turned out to not lead anywhere. This geometric construction of fundamental forces which is called Kaluza-Klein theory, suffers from several problems that no one has managed to solved.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Should Stephen Hawking have won the Nobel? Rob Sheldon weighs in
Rob Sheldon: Hawking did not get the Nobel, however, because he hung his hopes on the radiation emitted by BH–the so-called “Hawking radiation”. And it was never observed. Sabine tries to explain why. But one argument that Sabine doesn’t make, is that Hawking radiation may never have been observed because BH are themselves never observed.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks: Whatever happened to life on Venus?
Hossenfelder ends by reminding us, re phosphine on Venus, that “ absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” True, but that’s just a corollary of the fact that one can’t prove a negative. No, we can’t but that doesn’t prevent us from drawing reasonable conclusions. The proverb has been used to cover far too many situations where a more realistic conclusion would be “There is no particular reason to believe this.”
Sabine Hossenfelder reassures us that Schrodinger’s cat is still not dead
Hossenfelder: It’s no secret that I myself am signed up to superdeterminism, which means that the measurement outcome is partly determined by the measurement settings. In this case, the cat may start out in a superposition, but by the time you measure it, it has reached the state which you actually observe. So, there is no sudden collapse in superdeterminism, it’s a smooth, deterministic, and local process.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Do complex numbers exist?
The people who don’t think complex numbers really exist would probably not be happy with quantum mechanics being even more non-local without them. But of course, if complex numbers really do exist, then immaterial things really exist. Not a good time to be a hard core materialist.
Sabine Hossenfelder explains why she thinks that the computer sim universe is pseudoscience
Hossenfelder: You can approximate the laws that we know with a computer simulation – we do this all the time – but if that was how nature actually worked, we could see the difference. Indeed, physicists have looked for signs that natural laws really proceed step by step, like in a computer code, but their search has come up empty handed.
Sabine Hossenfelder on “quantum hype”
Hossenfelder: First, you cannot transfer information faster than the speed of light with the quantum internet or with any other quantum effect.
Was the universe “made for us”? Sabine Hossenfelder weighs in. Rob Sheldon comments
The question, addressed by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, is more complicated than it appears at first.
One of our favorite physicists thinks infinities and singularities aren’t real
Why would a person need to believe that neither infinity nor singularity are real?
At Quanta: Are we looking at the end of physics?
Ah yes, the problem of dead-endedness that Sabine Hossenfelder often writes about. As does Columbia mathematician Peter Woit, on the subject of string theory. But surely much of the nonsense around string theory and the multiverse is in part due to a practical failure—the inability to find even a single particle of dark matter or similar evidence for dark energy.
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is being labelled “anti-science”
Also, let this sink in: Despite believing in determinism, Hossenfelder believes we should “decide” against a new particle collider… We can decide? On that account, to other naturalists, she is “anti-science.” Naturalism is weird like that. Eats its own.
Free will makes more sense of our world than determinism—and science certainly allows for it
Scientists weigh in on both sides but accepting free will allows us to avoid some serious problems around logic and personal freedom.