I’ve been a follower of Sabine Hossenfelder since ~2008, mentioned here in 2014 and more including experiencing her appearances first-hand at HTLGI up to and beyond the publication of her “Lost in Math” in 2018.
She’s morphed in that time from being the typical scientist who would deny any “philosophy” as unscientific if not testable, to being philosophy-friendly (at least philosophy-of-science friendly) to her current phase of ranting against the ills of the scientific enterprise more generally.
Three of those recent rants below. The first I shared 6 months ago with local Sceptics / Humanists in which they (most seeing her for the first time, I was surprised to hear) misinterpreted her rant as hard-done-by sour-grapes at “her failure” to succeed as a practising academic physicist. Talk about missing the point. (I think she spoke at the recent QEDcon?) The other two videos are from the last few weeks.
I lost faith in scientists a long time ago – the reason I started this blog almost 25 years ago was science over-reaching into believing it was (or could be) the one true explanation of anything and everything, reinforced in the public mind by sexed-up popular science media and the educational fashion for critical thinking. Usual disclaimer – don’t get me wrong – science and critical-thinking are wonderful resources and as an engineer in the physical-electro-mechanical-built-environment, my career depended on it. My beef is with that arrogant over-reach. The meme that if something’s not scientific, it can’t be true, right? it can only be bullshit.
Her point – in the middle video – is about lack of empirical testability in (would-be scientific) theories that have been repeatedly theorised about for decades, and yet they still command attention and resources. The ontological commitment, as philosopher Rebecca Goldstein calls it, demands that rubber hasn’t hit the road until said scientists can say (and even mean) “and that’s how the world really works”. As per Hossenfelder’s book, mathematical beauty and logical coherence are not even science without the explanatory step into the real-word. That real-world step might not be science.
And again, I’m fan of Carlo Rovelli’s writing. In terms of his “QLG” competitor to string-theory – the archetype of failed scientific ideas, alongside multiverse bullshit – it has a feature I like as an engineer, the loop of integration around inconvenient singularities, but I certainly don’t understand the theory as a whole, and am ultimately disappointed at the lack of any “so what” in the real-world.
Science needs its arrogance taking down a peg or two and a return to valuing the real world. It will surely die if the woke / anti-woke culture war doesn’t kill it first.
And I do still very much read books, despite sharing these short videos 🙂
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Post Note: Just capturing another of Sabine’s videos – “Entropy isn’t What You Think” which caught my eye in the side-bar when collecting links to the 3 above. It’s her more usual physicist educates non-physicists scope, but relevant to me because my information views of entropy are crucial to my own worldview, so I’d be interested to know if she disagrees with what I think I know 🙂
She doesn’t like the word order / ordered, but overall nothing contentious to me. Her link behind the information<>ignorance view of entropy is neat – the number of possible micro-states per macro-state … pretty standard textbook stuff as she says. BUT … in my words … Yes, the preservation and creation of new order (low entropy) is driven locally by life and intelligence, any life, even if we expire in our corner of the universe, it is highly likely – inevitable – to evolve elsewhere. Universal heat death isn’t very likely or inevitable. Our view is necessarily anthropic – macro-states are always a human (lack of) knowledge perspective – R.I.P. Rick Ryals.
Onward and upwards.
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And for balance a recent YouTube response from Professor Dave – that recognises her as a good sci-comm source, but is worried about her recent expressions of concern for where physical science is going. Not digested the whole, but his initial concern is that her expressions of concern attract attention from those with dubious anti-science agendas – an obvious risk – but what about her actual message? Doesn’t change the fact for me that science does need to learn from the expressed concerns I share with her, since long before she expressed them. It’s a lot more than good old “anti-establishment” that’s also behind the whole woke/anti-woke conspiracy-theory, culture wars. (In my language it’s actually the memetic problem, #Dysmemics )
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Because I’ve recently written about Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math and Graham Farmelo’s indirect response in The Universe Speaks in Numbers, and because you said the videos were short, I watched them. They weren’t all that short (as a sometime songwriter, I think in terms of three minutes), but they were certainly entertaining.
Hossenfelder’s complaint that science is a social enterprise, beset by all the problems of social behaviour, seems to have come as a surprise to her, but as someone with one foot in sociology, it’s no surprise to me. (One of the formative books I read on the subject was Peter L. Berger’s The Homeless Mind). This is not a new development. It was ever thus. Nevertheless, science has managed to make it through human history so far, and I’m sure it will continue to do so. Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
There are however, two new considerations in the mix. One is that high-energy physics research is running out of energy, as Hossenfelder argued in her book, and useful results are becoming scarce. As I said in a recent post, “It is now in the same boat as the rest of the human project: reduced to pondering, along with the poets, whether beauty may be some sort of guide to truth after all.”
The other is that the project of extending science from the fairly tractable study of matter to the study and explanation of absolutely everything is, as you point out, an overreach. We have come to the point in history where this is becoming a serious factor in our understanding of the world.
Great final line …
“We have come to the point in history where this is becoming a serious factor in our understanding of the world”
Kinda why I’ve been on this trail for nigh on 25 years now.
As you say, mostly not a surprise to those of us following the problem, but interesting that a public science advocate is now seeing it too?
I’ll raise my hand to being one of those ‘skeptics’ who ‘misinterpreted her rant.’ This may have been to miss point she was trying to make, but it was difficult to read much else into that particular video you posted, as I remember it. You asked for a comment on that specific video and that was all – in the absence of knowledge about her arguments expressed elsewhere – I could see in it. Perhaps it was not the best introduction. Is the current state of physics beyond criticism? Certainly not. To argue that would be to repeat the mistakes of the past. Is the view that physics is the master science, which ultimately determines the bounds of human knowledge, correct? Even if that were a coherent stance, it would be false. I was just not convinced that she made much of a case in that instance, which is not to deny that she might do so elsewhere.
Ha, no need for any defence from you, if it was your first contact with her – in rant mode – you were never gonna get much out of her (she’s well aware of that of course).
As well as the 3 “rants” above – note there is one of her more normal (public science education) videos.
[BTW – I mostly get (literal) ignorance from the skeptics – you’re one of the few engaged and switched-on when it comes to thinking outside the classic / rationalist / objective box. And I am of course much more interested in your view of my own words in these Psybertron posts 🙂 ]