Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

Sabine Hossenfelder

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. Read More ›

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? Read More ›

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. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: Colonizing Mars is a ridiculous idea!

The difficulties inherent in the idea of terraforming Mars are a good argument for the Privileged Planet Hypothesis regarding Earth. Earth is indeed special. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder: No way to tell if the universe was fine-tuned for us — Rob Sheldon partially agrees

Sheldon: Even though I agree with Sabine about the fine tuning argument, I disagree strongly with her about the significance of the design we see in the world. "It just is" is not an explanation. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder tackles pseudoscience — in a realistic way

Hossenfelder: “And some crazy ideas in the end turn out to be correct.” Yes, and it could be worse than that. Given the complexity of life, there should be no surprise if dimwits played by fanatics and grifters - Establishment or otherwise - are fronting poorly supported ideas and trying to stamp out more correct ideas as “pseudoscience” because the poorly supported ideas are convenient, comforting, and profitable. Anyone who doubts that factor either hasn’t been around long or has not been paying attention. Read More ›

If dark energy is “neither particle nor field,” what is it?

Siegel: "It is time to take seriously the idea that dark energy might simply be a property inherent to the very fabric of space. Until we learn how to calculate the zero-point energy of empty space itself, or gain some bizarre, surprising, and unanticipated evidence, this will remain one of the biggest existential questions in all the universe." So this is existentialism for physicists, right? Even Sabine Hossenfelder sounds sort of existential on this one. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder asks a curious question: Where did the Big Bang happen?

Hossenfelder: There are two warnings I have to add when it comes to the “Big Bang”. First, I don’t know anybody who actually believes that this singularity is physically real. It probably just means that Einstein’s equations break down and must be replaced by something else. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder asks, what’s up with neutrinos?

Hossenfelder has stumbled on a telling fact about science journalism. Often, the genuinely puzzling problem is ignored in favour of some a big whoop de do about an incidental find that doesn’t amount to much and may prove an artifact of data collection. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder: New evidence against the Standard Model of cosmology

Hossenfelder: "... the evidence is mounting that the cosmological principle is a bad assumption to develop a model for the entire universe and it probably has to go. It increasingly looks like we live in a region in the universe that happens to have a significantly lower density than the average in the visible universe." Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder despairs over vacuum energy. Rob Sheldon responds

These specialty controversies are an interesting backdrop to the current war on math. Sabine Hossenfelder and Rob Sheldon would likely agree that 2 + 2 = 4. But survey the vast degreed hordes for whom such a statement is an instance of white supremacy and colonialism and we will see the real problem facing our civilization: Far too many people have degrees (and grievances!) but no insight into what knowledge is. Read More ›