Sabine Hossenfelder

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, says science has a problem and we need to talk: For the past 15 years, I have worked in the foundations of physics, a field which has not seen progress for decades. What happened 40 years ago is that theorists in my discipline became convinced the laws of nature must be mathematically beautiful in specific ways. By these standards, which are still used today, a good theory should be simple, and have symmetries, and it should not have numbers that are much larger or smaller than one, the latter referred to as “naturalness.” Based on such arguments from beauty, they predicted that protons should be able to decay. Read More ›

We are told: “Wherever you look in the cosmos, things don’t seem to add up.” And now physicists like Sabine Hossenfelder are accused of cheating: Ethan Siegel, astrophysicist-blogger behind Forbes’ Starts With a Bang! blog, responded with a post titled “There’s A Debate Raging Over Whether Dark Matter Is Real, But One Side Is Cheating.” He wrote that, in order to win favor from the public, Hossenfelder and McGaugh were setting up a false narrative by treating the fight as an even one, even though the support for a dark matter particle far outweighs the opposing side. Naturally, McGaugh and Hossenfelder were not happy to be called cheaters. McGaugh argued that he’s published far more scientific papers than Siegel has. Read More ›

From previous universe: In Penrose and similarly-inclined physicists’ history of space and time (which they call conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC), universes bubble up, expand and die in sequence, with black holes from each leaving traces in the universes that follow. And in a new paper released Aug. 6 in the preprint journal arXiv—apparent evidence for Hawking points in the CMB sky— Penrose, along with State University of New York Maritime College mathematician Daniel An and University of Warsaw theoretical physicist Krzysztof Meissner, argued that those traces are visible in existing data from the CMB. Daniel An explained how these traces form and survive from one eon to the next. “If the universe goes on and on and the black Read More ›

For all practical purposes. From the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog BackRe(Action) According to Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, the universe goes through an infinite series of “aeons,” each of which starts with a phase resembling a big bang, then forming galactic structures as usual, then cooling down as stars die. In the end the only thing that’s left are evaporating black holes and thinly dispersed radiation. Penrose then conjectures a slight change to particle physics that allows him to attach the end of one aeon to the beginning of another, and everything starts anew with the next bang. This match between one aeon’s end and another’s beginning necessitates the introduction of a new Read More ›

The physicist who answers is Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) and she responds, saying (among other things) If you want every elementary particle to each have a universe inside, you need to explain why we only know 25 different elementary particles. Why aren’t there billions of them? An even bigger problem is that elementary particles are quantum objects: They get constantly created and destroyed and they can be in several places at once. How would structure formation ever work in such a universe? It is also a generally the case in quantum theories that the more variants there are of a particle, the more of them you produce. So why don’t we produce Read More ›