I ask you, what else you expect anyone else to do? Isn't this exactly a scientific process? and anything else amounts to gatekeeping.
(quick edit: I'm all for taking everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt though, even peer reviewed papers shouldn't be taken uncritically)
The problem, or at least my perception of the situation, is that she does not do what she claims to be doing. She forms uninformed opinions optimized to be engaging, interesting, and conspiratorial, instead of boring sound interpretations of what she has read.
The sad thing is that the only way for someone reading this to know whether I am gatekeeping or warning about an actual crank is to do all of this work from scratch yourself.
(I easily concede that there are plenty of problems with the institution of "Science" today -- I just think she exploits the existence of these problems to aggrandize herself instead of engage in fixing them in a productive way)
Science is a collaborative social endeavor that exists under a shared set of norms and rules that have the goal of producing new knowledge. She's skipping the social part. She could email these people and ask for input! Many of her weird mistakes and misunderstandings could all be caught by cursory review from a middling grad student.
None of these papers were written for her, she is not the audience, you are not the audience. One of the points of graduate education is to get people to the point where they and meaningfully engage with the state of the art. This process takes years!
Compare her output to people like the math/comedy youtuber matt parker or the numberphile channels, which invite collaboration from the authors directly. They aren't experts themselves, but they do the work to make it interesting and present things as accurately as possible.
Every field has a shared language and culture that needs to be internalised to some degree before you can usefully engage with their contents. Some terms you think you are familiar with will have slightly different meanings within a domain, and just assuming you understand it during even a well-intentioned and careful read can still lead you astray.
Feel free to come up with your own predictive model of whether someone is worth listening to. It's hard to compare such models fairly, but if you feel yours is better, it might be worth sharing.
I only got the first 1/2 of my physics degree before moving on to CS, but to me this reads as “We know eternal life can only be obtained from unicorn blood, so for this paper we must use a fairytale approach.”
In the most plain terms, the author is claiming that the collapse of the wave function can be explained deterministically if you just accept that it was preordained.
Which means that "we must use a superdeterministic approach" is incorrect. It means that you may use a superdeterministic approach. If that approach is productive, that may cause people to favor your interpretation. But it does not rule out other interpretations. At most, it can make them sufficiently inconvenient as to dismiss them.
She has a popular science channel https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos
I also understand she is considered controversial as she's been criticizing the scientific community, mostly on how they get funding and how they pick research direction.
From little I understood from it in this paper she is basing it off the Penrose QM-GR interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_interpretation
lkey•3mo ago
"I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote it myself."
Sabine Hossenfelder has been on what I'd call a 'physics crank' arc of late. Believing her one expertise can be substituted for another in fields like sociology and economics. I expect this paper to fit that mold, rather than being a return to the academy.
I'd be happy to be wrong in this case, but I'm rather skeptical. Unfortunately, I lack the qualifications to speak to the merits one way or another.
karmakurtisaani•3mo ago