Sabine Hossenfelder

I enjoyed the style of this book, combining interviews with reviews and informed “opinion”. The problems the author dives into are ones i have often wondered but found hard to navigate due to the exceas of literature on the subjects, the author does a good job at pruning this.

Overall the book is a bit choppy and conceptually inconsistent without spending the time to realise and explain this. But a very good starting point for approaching existential questions from a physicist point of view.

Not for everyone, some background science familiarity is useful.… (mehr)

Picked this up since I like her channel. Good on science, weak on philosophy about sums it up. For the most part she takes the Wittgensteinian notion that it's okay to think some questions and implications of science are not useful or worth talking about. However, any time Hossenfelder sees something as 'allowed' by the state of the science, she's instead all aboard, no matter how credulous the proposition.
It all makes for a lot of whiplash if you're looking for some stringent scientific skepticism.… (mehr)

I am inundated with the world's voices - podcasts, YouTube videos, Instagram messages, cable TV. If we suppose that the intelligence of these commentators is normally distributed then it's likely that many of their comments are a waste of our time (this is apparent even if we don't suppose this). So, it is such a pleasure to hear what a smart person has to say.

Dr. Hossenfelder discusses various basic questions of a type usually addressed by philosophers, theologians, or your freshman-year roommate, from her viewpoint as a theoretical physicist. I won't list them here, but my only tiny complaint is that some of them are so fanciful that I didn't find them very interesting.

A good summary of SH's comments is the famous, and probably apocryphal, story that Napolean Bonaparte after reading Pierre-Simon Laplace's Celestial Mechanics commented to him that it was very nice, but there was no mention of God. Laplace replied je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse, "I had no need of that hypothesis".… (mehr)

Ms. Hossenfelder's is an unapologetic, chip-on-her-shoulder reductionist who repeatedly asserts that nothing disproving reductionism has ever been found using the scientific method. I say big deal, science consists of provisional theories and we have no way of measuring our ignorance, which could be vast and, for all we know, near total. The author seems untroubled by the fact that science has nothing to say about value or meaning and the dimensions they add to experience.

The book gets four stars anyway, though, since it adeptly covers a lot of fascinating areas, including consciousness, multiverses, simulations, Boltzmann brains, free will, AI, and much more.… (mehr)