Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Sabine Hossenfelder: Science is a Liar ... Sometimes (Patreon)

Published:
2024-11-11 07:13:06
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

  • Sabine Hossenfelder MF.mp3

Some files exceed the archive size limit and weren't saved: 1 file. Please note these limits are in place to keep this site running long term, without costing a fortune. You can favorite the creator though, certain milestones increase the limit.

Content

In this highly non-topical episode, Matt and Chris dive into the entertainingly gruff world of Sabine Hossenfelder, the German theoretical physicist and popular YouTube science communicator. Known as a joyful science curmudgeon, Sabine excels at making complex science accessible to a wide audience. Yet, there's another side to her content: one that's increasingly steeped in the YouTube algorithm’s culture-war-fueled clickbait, complete with prolific both-sidesing and even hints of her own brand of science-denialist rhetoric.

We can already imagine Sabine’s response: accusations of censorship from establishment shills trying to silence a fearless truth-teller for exposing academia’s dark underbelly. Perhaps that’s all it is—maybe Matt and Chris are aligned with BIG PHYSICS, out to quash any dissent about supersymmetry, string theory, or the academic publishing machine.

Or… maybe it’s something else. Maybe Sabine has pivoted to court the (so-hot-right-now) anti-establishment YouTube crowd, declaring that modern science has achieved nothing of value in 50 years and claiming that scientists (especially climate scientists) are too scared to challenge ideological dogmas for fear of jeopardizing their careers or funding.

It’s certainly one of those things.

Whatever the case, join Matt and Chris as they tackle this perplexing case of rhetorical indeterminacy, unpack YouTube audience dynamics, and delve into Sabine's unexpected alignments with Eric Weinstein and her 'sharp' critiques of Tucker Carlson.

Links

Sabine Hossenfelder: The crisis in physics is real: Science is failing

Sabine Hossenfelder: Fossil Fuels Don’t Come From Fossils? Tucker Carlson Fact Check

Sabine Hossenfelder: My dream died, and now I'm here

Sabine Hossenfelder: Theories of Everything [Music Video]

Professor Dave Explains: The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder

Professor Dave Explains: No, Sabine, Science is Not Failing

Files

Comments

James P.

Hey Matt, you're in my hood. You coming through phoenix?

Ion

Are you guys going to sound like some' of those science bitches that have been wrong in the past? 😒

RareTripleBait

Really curious about the episode! Watch one of her videos maybe 1 or 2 years ago. She seemed refreshingly down to earth and non-guru ish at that time

RareTripleBait

Regarding youtube thumbnails: Editor Andy really needs to bully you two into a youtube-thumbnail-face photoshoot! The views and audience dynamics demand it

RareTripleBait

found Sabine dunking on Tucker way too enjoyable Almost feel guilty. Almost

Kit Zullasson

Gotta love Sabine for pronouncing Eric's last name the German way

Grignard Girlie

So grateful to have this off topic decoding. As much as I look forward to y’alls take on the election, I’m also so good not hearing about it for now.

Reinert

Been looking forward to this! Although I enjoy much of her content, I've found Hossenfelder a bit offputting in recent years. There's something about the matter-of-fact way of speaking and deadpan delivery which makes it hard to disagree with what she's saying if one is predisposed to antiestablishment thinking. And if I'm not mistaken I think Dave's criticism boils down to the fact that fans of hers who are themselves academics will read one thing into it which aligns with their own possibly justified frustrations while non-academics, who might be the majority of her viewership, will interpret it in quite another direction which is much closer to IDW rhetoric. She says she doesn't care that some people misinterpret her message but IMO she should.

Tim Tripp

This is the first time I have heard Sabine and I find her hyperbolic and off putting.

weltysparrow

Sabine comes across as your stereotypical physicist: someone who is very very smart, but thinks that makes them knowledgeable in every field they put their mind to for even 5 seconds.

Tim Tripp

The fossil fuel industry has done much to make themselves the villains.

Trees

Silly Matt and Chris, theoretical physics is science--everything else is stamp collecting. If it's not progressing, science is doomed. If only you were physicists, you'd understand. 😄

Grignard Girlie

Ok got thru this episode and re the final question posed (will a trump vs a Harris presidency cause more guru activity)- the answer is “yes” ☺️ the last trump presidency was like watching a soap opera with a revolving cast of characters so I’m very curious to see which of our gurus cycles in and out of the trump orbit. Hoping that the rfk downfall is before he decides I’m only allowed to treat my crohns with vit D 😬😅

Saad Ahmed

I haven't finished listening to the episode yet but I am a layman physics appreciator myself. I think when Sabine was sayingthat progress in fundamental physics has stagnated- she was referring to the fact that we know that the standard model and general relativity are incompatible with each other and also are thought to be incomplete. They make exquisitely precise predictions which have been confirmed but there was a lot of hope that the LHC would provide evidence for theories beyond the standard model. I think her argument was that these big projects like the LHC and it's successors are consuming are inordinate amount of resources and not delivering on their promise of new physics. I think that applies to string theory as well in that there has been a lot of money and manpower thrown at the problem without ultimately adding anything new to our current understanding of physics. I think her title "Lost in math" comes from her view that our pursuit of mathematical elegance and beauty in physics has led the field astray and that all the incentives structures are set up so that there is no desire to a stop the gravy train of funding for these big projects. I know plenty of physicists including Sean Carrol have taken an issue with that framing

commutercomputer

I heard about Sabine in 2019. Originally she had good criticism of theoretical physics. But it's sad that she had chosen to flirt with science denialism, because there's room for science communicator with feet on the ground. Tucker Carlson section was in my opinion damning, because it showed how she needs to provide fan service to her science denying audience, while claiming to be honest truth seeker. Firstly Sabine didn't bother to mention that COPs and parts of the IPCC have always had political components. In every climate conferences there's political debate about exact wording of documents and so on. Maybe the quote was removed due to political process not by scientists. Secondly there's nothing controversial about CCS (carbon capture and storage) and it's included as a one mitigation method. IPCC even hosted meeting solely on CCS in this this year. However Sabine didn't bother to mention this and instead implied that climate science wants to silence the discussion.

aneladgam_varelse

I’m at 27 min and I feel obligated to point out that chemistry indeed first invented some elements according to periodic table and then started searching for them in real life. The search was finished with success.

aneladgam_varelse

Do you consider probability of a claim directly related to incentive the person have?

aneladgam_varelse

Re: what is the problem, climate change or the fossil fuels? I’m with Sabine on this one, because people tend to focus on moving away from fossil fuels rather than on reducing effects on climate. It really isnt synonymous! For example so-called biomass isn’t fossil fuels yet isn’t better alternative: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02676-z?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=4b9b7634b5-nature-briefing-daily-20240820&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-4b9b7634b5-51277672 Also I had not long ago argument irl if humankind should stop developing aviation because of climate change (my position is yes absolutely), the other person couldn’t process that planes fueled with biomass instead of fossil fuels aren’t neutral now, because it doesn’t matter how it’s fueled, it matters how much CO2 it emits - and in case of aviation that it emits it directly into higher parts of atmosphere.

Ben Godek

One of the weirdest parts to me was when she was dismissive about how the LHC didn’t find supersymmetric particles. How were those theorists supposed to know their theory was wrong before that? I thought she wanted theories that were falsifiable!

Barbara Wright

She’s stitched together an attractive grievance narrative, but it mainly rests on the hope that her viewers aren’t really engaged with science - a field where wild hypotheses are the ones that push thinking forward - Kekulé dreaming about an ouroboros and figuring out the structure of benzene being a case in point. And more than that…you have to try a lot of different hypotheses to get one that works. If every hypotheses was a winner, you’d be a genius, or more likely, cooking the results. She’s particularly interested in a field where most of the low hanging fruit have already been picked, so it seems reasonable that the time between problems being solved would increase, as the number of problems to be solved decreases and the complexity of the problems increases. I do agree that science has significant issues, but she’s blaming science for not meeting her unrealistic expectations. That might be a her problem, not a science problem.

Sean Power

What a great discussion! (I was put off by Hossenfelder’s attitude to philosophy, but also unsurprised (and I don’t assume physicists have any better takes on philosophy than I do on Darwinism…). But! String theory! Can I recommend Angela Collier - a dark matter physicist - YouTube video on it? ‘String Theory Lied to Us’. A great discussion on the problems of string theory as a physical theory and the impact string theory popularity has had on the media’s attitude to physics. Collier also does a critical video on the idea that physics hasn’t advanced in 70 years, which relates to Hossenfelder’s work. Also, Collier is very casually funny and you should interview her*: https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=fUYJjwCPILbNFY5Z. (*or not. I’m not your dads)

RipleyV

Great episode. I won't hold my breath for it, but I sincerely hope she takes up her right to reply offer. I think Sabine is genuine and grounded enough in reality that a conversation with her hashing these critiques out could be really interesting

Ron McKinnon

Small nitpick: it’s pronounced NU-CLE-UR.

Idan Ca

I think DTG inoculated me against being impressed with any claim that begins with ‘x has a problem’ where x is a widely encompassing field or domain or just a vague denominator. I hear ‘science has a problem’ and it’s the same bs to me as ‘the left has a problem’ or the west or the media or young males. It’s nothing but an attention grab.

CrystalJade

I do feel like there is this pattern where a kernel of truth gets blown up to a disproportionate size by creating more discourse. And by each turn the error is compounded. It feels like what is started with a grievance becomes more concrete and more absolute. I wonder if there is a stable conspiracy ladder that starts with a grievance that transforms into conspiracy after a number of cycles. How many times does a grievance need to be recycled to turn into a conspiracy?

Michal Lichota

It’s not Sabeen, it’s Sabině. You’re hurting the European ears.

Linda Sears

My dad taught physics at a local university from the late sixties to the early 2000s. The professors who got the big grants and promotions at that time were those who did applied physics; most of this was driven by the interests of defense contractors and industries. My dad did theoretical physics, which wasn’t considered as important, so it’s interesting to hear Sabine criticize theoretical physicists.

Tree

In Aus there is probably more money going into carbon capture research in my field than every other area of it put together. (And its pretty much based on hype)

Emil Mi

The methods that do not work are the theoretical, not the experimental ones. The experimentalists come up with theories that are "beautifull" (beautiful has a speciffic technical meaning - small number of parameters, constants that are close to 1 or pi or such) and then send experimentalists to disprove them which they always seem to happen for the last tens of years. She doesn't claim to know how to solve this blockage, but claims that the money that goes to these people and their ever increasing colliders that fail to see anything new could be better spent elsewhere (in the past she gave examples from solid state physics, quantum, astrophysics)

AdS5xS5

It’s bitterly ironic to complain about the perverse incentives in science and then get sucked into YouTubing. First time commenter here. First off: my background is as a fundamental physics theorist (hence the user name) who jumped ship to particle experiment and then to data science. I made the first jump when I saw LHC’s run 1 steamroller a number of people’s life’s work and realised which side of that equation I preferred being on. I did my PhD as part of one of the Higgs analyses at CERN’s CMS and then took my skills into industry. I guess I’m fairly unprincipled and mercenary… but I have seen this from the inside from a few angles. Her experience of the pathologies in fundamental theory seems to have been amplified and projected onto the rest of science. It is true that string theory and the like have become something of degenerating research programme, but it’s not like there is some grand conspiracy. Carlo Rovelli hasn’t been carted off by the theory stasi. A lot of research projects were dominated by that when I left though. That was one of my reasons for doing so. The standard model is very good but incomplete. No gravity, neutrino masses, hierarchy problem etc. String theory claims to do better but doesn’t really. No one has derived the SM as a lower energy limit of it. There are issues computing scattering amplitudes at tree level, it needs supersymmetry to have fermions, various other things I half remember. The remark about post 70s stuff refers to this and is distinct from the SM. The SM is built from two yang mills theories one of which is spontaneously broken by the Higgs field. This view definitely does not carry over to experimental particle physics. There are few experimentalists at CERN who don’t think theorists are full of shit. That’s almost part of the job description. We look askance at their tendency to push the mass ranges of their predictions up whenever the machine gets an energy upgrade. But again, that’s not a conspiracy that’s just them trying to make things work within the experimental constraints. Furthermore, the FCC is for more than just another bump hunt for a theorist’s prediction. Happy to answer any questions unless you’re one of the loons who used to spam my CERN email address. P.S. keep up to good work lads.

Jonathan Cano

I like Sabine's explainer vids. I can't stomach the heterodox baiting stuff. In the "science is failing" video does she offer detailed suggestions on what should be done or is it just vague whining about the status quo? IMO, the big questions are "how much should we be spending on fundamental physics right now?" and "where should the money we decide to spend on it go?" Maybe it is time to tread water in this area and put more resources elsewhere (e.g. making a useful fusion power reactor). Maybe in 50 or 100 years the time will be ripe to make fundamental physics advances.

Linda Sears

It irks me when rogue theoretical physicists are viewed as experts on climate change as if people whose life work in that field are not to be trusted. People in thrall with the idea that physicists are the real science geniuses, (Einstein), will not understand that science fields are highly specialized, and a theoretical physicist is probably not the best person to listen to if you want to investigate fluctuations in global temperatures throughout the past million years. Since theoretical physics is also the most likely science to attract the woo minded, finding a willing physicist to talk in ways that appear to fit one’s bizarre theories is more easily done, especially if the person asking the questions doesn’t really understand the science.

Kyle Dun

Finally finished this one. Glad I did otherwise would have missed my shout out!

Joseph Sullivan

Sabine Hossenfelder makes scientists and everyone on earth LOOK LIKE A BITCH AGAIN! IFYKYK