We observe phenomena in this universe that are beyond the known constraints imposed by the laws of nature, implying that natural explanations are insufficient to explain their existence. The origin of this universe is one of those observed realities that transcend the abilities of nature.
Tag: Sabine Hossenfelder
At Mind Matters News: Sabine Hossenfelder asks, is the multiverse science or religion?
Introducing her new book, Existential Physics, Hossenfelder makes a strong case that the multiverse is not right or wrong; it’s fun but not really science.
At Mind Matters News: Astrophysicist: Webb finds may bring “revolutionary changes”
It doesn’t disprove the Big Bang, says Brian Koberlein… but read the fine print. Fermilab’s Don Lincoln gets the religious implications all wrong. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder thinks we don’t know what happened and never will — and that the Big Bang is a “creation myth” in the language of math.
At Mind Matters News: Why science news sucks — a response to a disgusted physicist
Science writers, and their readers, often seek a certainty from science that it can’t really provide. They graft it in — so, of COURSE, they find it.
Sabine Hossenfelder tackles trans women in women’s sports
And ends by saying that childhood genetic engineering will probably bring an end to high achiever sports altogether.
Sabine Hossenfelder: The big problem with quantum theory is chaos
Hossenfelder: “… the chaotic motion of Hyperion tells us that we need the measurement collapse to actually be a physical process. Without it, quantum mechanics just doesn’t correctly describe our observations. But then what is this process? No one knows. And that’s the problem with quantum mechanics.”
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, did the W-boson break the Standard Model?
Hossenfelder: Is it correct? I don’t know. It could be. But in all honesty, I am very skeptical that this result will hold up. More likely, they have underestimated the error and their result is actually compatible with the other measurements.
Sabine Hossenfelder tells us who’s killing physics
Hossenfelder: But this illusion of progress is the minor problem. Worse is that they seem resigned to the idea that foundational work in physics is detached from experiment and technological application.
Kirk Durston on Sabine Hossenfelder and God
Biophysicist Kirk Durston offers some feedback to theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. Lots of comments, including “You are dead on that she avoids talking about how space, time, matter, and energy came into existence.”
At Mind Matters News: John Horgan at Scientific American: Does quantum mechanics kill free will?
Horgan sides, somewhat tentatively, with free will. He notes that humans are more than just heaps of particles. Higher levels of complexity enable genuinely new qualities. What humans can do is not merely a more complex version of what amoebas can do — in turn, a more complex version of what electrons can do. Greater complexity can involve genuinely new qualities. A philosopher would say that he is not a reductionist.
At Mind Matters News: Some elements of our universe do not make scientific sense
The usually commonsensical Sabine Hossenfelder admits that this one stumps physicists: Well-attested observations of neutrinos are not compatible with the Standard Model of our universe that most physicists accept. Much about neutrinos is weird and it does not appear to be an artifact of bungled experiments.
Sabine Hossenfelder on epic fights in science
Hossenfelder: Together the two men discovered 136 species of dinosaurs (Cope 56 and Marsh 80) but they died financially ruined with their scientific reputation destroyed [over their feuds].
What Sabine Hossenfelder hopes the James Webb telescope will do
Hossenfelder: What you can see from this graph is that if this theory is correct there basically shouldn’t be any large galaxies at very early times… If the Webb telescope sees large galaxies anyhow, then that’s going to be very difficult to explain with dark matter.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, why do we think antimatter asymmetry is a problem?
Hossenfelder: “[O]nce you insist that the ratio was actually one, you have to come up with a mechanism for how it ended up not being one. And then you can publish papers with all kinds of complicated solutions to the problem which you just created. ” Isn’t she overlooking something?
Sabine Hossenfelder explains why antimatter doesn’t fall up
Hossenfelder: Inside a neutron and proton there aren’t just three quarks. There’s really a soup of particles that holds the quarks together, and some of the particles in the soup are anti-particles. Why don’t those anti-particles annihilate? They do. They are created and annihilate all the time. We therefore call them “virtual particles.” But they still make a substantial contribution to the gravitational mass of neutrons and protons.