Sabine Hossenfelder
Mind the Gap Between Science and Religion
Scientists should respect the limits of their discipline. Photo illustration by Triff / ShutterstockHave you heard that we may be living in a computer simulation? Or that our universe is only one of infinitely many parallel worlds in which you live every possible variation of your life? Or that the laws of nature derive from […]
The Real Differences Between Human and Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, it seems, is now everywhere. Text translation, speech recognition, book recommendations, even your spam filter is now “artificially intelligent.” But just what do scientists mean with “artificial intelligence,” and what is artificial about it?Artificial intelligence is a term that was coined in the 1980s, and today’s research on the topic has many facets. […]
When Beauty Gets in the Way of Science
Insisting that new ideas must be beautiful blocks progress in particle physics.
First Black-Hole Image: It’s Not Looks That Count
FIRST LOOK: The Event Horizon Telescope measures wavelength in the millimeter regime, too long to be seen by eye, but ideally suited to the task of imaging a black hole: The gas surrounding the black hole is almost transparent at this wavelength and the light travels to Earth almost undisturbed. Since we cannot see light […]
When Gravity Breaks Down
Theoretical physicists have known since the 1930s that quantum gravity is necessary to bring order into the laws of nature, but 80 years on, a solution isn’t anywhere in sight.Photograph by Andrea / Flickr Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is more than a hundred years old, but still it gives physicists headaches. Not only […]
The Present Phase of Stagnation in the Foundations of Physics Is Not Normal
The problem is loads of wrong predictions from theoretical physicists.Photograph by Inga Nielsen / Shutterstock Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But […]
Outraged By the Google Diversity Memo? I Want You to Think About It
Damore was fired, basically, for making a well-meant, if amateurish, attempt at institutional design, based on woefully incomplete information he picked from published research studies. But however imperfect his attempt, he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own. And what example does that set?Photograph by Verco That leaked internal memo from James Damore […]
What Quantum Gravity Needs Is More Experiments
Math won’t solve quantum gravity. Experimentation will.
