Skip to main content

Sabine Hossenfelder - Five Way Interview

Image © Joerg Steinmetz
Sabine Hossenfelder grew up in Frankfurt, Germany. She has a PhD in physics and is presently a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. Her current work is mostly in the foundation of physics. She has written over 80 research papers on topics ranging from quantum gravity to particle physics, cosmology, astrophysics, statistical mechanics, and quantum foundations. 

Sabine is creator of the popular YouTube channel Science without the gobbledygook. Her first book Lost in Math was published by Basic Books in June 2018. Her writing has been published, amongst others, in Scientific American, New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, Nautilus, and the New York Times. Her latest book is Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions.

Why Science?

Because I’m a curious person and science constantly teaches me new things. 

Why this book?

Physics taught us some deep lessons about the nature of time and reality and the limits of science that I think physicists don’t talk about enough. I wanted to tell people what we have learned, but also tell them where physics crosses over into pure speculation. So my book basically demarks the boundary between physics and religion and philosophy.

Why is the distinction between unscientific and ascientific important?

It’s like the distinction between atheist and agnostic. An atheist does not believe that god exists, an agnostic has no opinion about whether god exists or not – it’s a neutral position. We call something unscientific when it does not follow scientific methodology. By ascientific I mean something that science says nothing about. For example, planning your day based on what the horoscope says is unscientific. The idea that other universes exist that we cannot interact with is ascientific. Science can’t tell us whether they exist, but it also can’t tell us that they don’t exist. It’s not unscientific to believe in those other universes.

The distinction matters to me because ascientific ideas I think should have a place in our lives, and brains, and hearts. They should not be thrown out with those ideas that go against science just because our vocabulary doesn’t distinguish the two. 

What's next?

I am planning to have a weekly “Science News” show on my YouTube channel “Science Without the Gobbledygook”. As you can probably guess, I spend a lot of time reading science news, but not everyone has the time. So, once a week, I want to summarize the biggest science news for busy people, and hopefully have some interesting conversations about them! We’ll start this in a 10 week trial in early October. 

What's exciting you at the moment?

Like all astrophysicists, I am excited about the results from the Webb telescope. The data from early galaxies could really shake things up, and finally convince the community that the dark matter hypothesis has severe shortcomings. 

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a digest free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more