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)
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.
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•4h 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•48m ago