Gravity Can Explain the Collapse of the Wavefunction (Sabine Hossenfelder)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
The author has become somewhat notorious in physics circles for groan-inducing takes. That's not to say everything she has produced is bad, because it's not, but she has taken a hard turn into audience capture and speaking over-confidently far out of her area of expertise. It will be interesting to see how the experts respond to this paper, if they do at all. Given the format I'm not sure it's actually designed to be submitted for publishing or if it's just formatted in academic paper style and uploaded to arXiv for some other reason. Note that virtually anyone can register for and upload a document to arXiv, so this being on arXiv.org doesn't imply anything specific.
Sounds like she is doing Youtube to earn some bucks off it, then? Usually, you'll stir up a controversy or make bold claims to create engagement, which in turn pleases "the algorithm".
Lately she's been dabbling with soft support for well known grifters like Eric Weinstein, though last I heard she stopped short of actually endorsing his theories. I think there's just too many views to be had by courting that audience, so it becomes irresistible to engage with. The best thing a good physics communicator could do would be to completely ignore the well known physics grifters and focus on the quality content, but instead she has been leaning toward defensing Weinstein and others.
Sabine makes a video with sponsorship included basically every day. With her subscription numbers, that's a LOT of money.
Basically, screaming that "They don't want you to hear THIS" is extremely profitable. She's a very well paid member of the anti-science ecosystem.
I am critical of her, but I would not put her on the level of Alex Jones or other really awful people. However, her blurb on the back of that "War on science" book is pretty gross.
Sabine absolutely is still capable of producing and understanding science. She chooses to make the content she does. She also clearly treats her youtube career as just business, making pretty good money from taking random science papers from random journals and using them as a reason to lambast all of science. Plenty of youtubers who do science, including people who post here like the guy from Applied Science, are pretty far from monetizing their content, sometimes to a fault, generally because they aren't looking to make crazy money, just cool stuff.
I actually hope she publishes more. This paper looks..... not good, but every good scientist has put out papers that are more like afternoon fun than rigorous work. That's fine by me. I would love for Sabine to produce real science, it's vastly more beneficial for humanity than her "Here's how science LIES TO YOU" slop. I tried to watch her in the beginning, but even then it was clear the kind of audience she was trying to cultivate. It feels gross.
I don't know if she truly believes what she says. Her complaints about being mistreated for being a woman seemed sincere, and not as trumped up as most of her videos, and there's plenty of sexism in science Academia, just like most places.
It's hard to criticize Youtubers for their thumbnails and titles, as the soulless youtube machine forces them, but there's definitely a pattern.
Basically, it's hard to look at people like NileRed, Explosions&Fire, Applied Science, Thought Emporium, etc who are literally running science labs through patreon funding and then Sabine says she's being silenced for her unorthodox views with over a million subscribers.
I'm tired of people claiming they are silenced while parrot literal mainstream talking points to an audience of millions.
Complaints about "The hubble tension shows we might not have everything right in our astrophysics models" is fine, dandy, I literally agree (I'm not a physicist), but complaining about string theory, which remember she's a physicist so she KNOWS nobody in physics actually spends any time, breath, or effort on string theory, and her claims that "Physics hasn't done anything in 50 years" is blatantly false and she is well equipped to KNOW this.
For context: if I did the napkin math correctly based on the Angel Collier video on this topic, it appeared to be easily over $2M/year. The grift pays very well.
The problem with influencers like this is the way their fans get a giant blind spot for “BS” that comes from their chosen anti-BS person.
Sabine fans will always cite problems with academia pushing BS papers, but Sabine has herself been embroiled in a lot of arguably “BS” content for the sake of YouTube views and advertising dollars.
You have to acknowledge the irony of thinking that an ad-supported YouTuber pushing clickbait headlines is the lone person saving you from the scientists and their misaligned incentives.
> the ChatGPT acknowledgement
She acknowledged to have used it for literature research, not for writing the paper (she explicitly emphasizes she wrote it herself), which you didn't make clear. Many researchers today probably use it similarly for literature research (rather than just Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, etc), and there is nothing wrong with that.
> I suppose not surprising coming from someone who built their career on YouTube.
Phrasing it like that seems misleading. She has a PhD and has worked in academia as a theoretical physicist for most of her career, she has published papers, and she has had a popular physics blog (with people like Peter Shor commenting) for much longer than her YouTube channel.
I actually opened the paper and started reading and I’m commenting on that. It’s frustrating that anything less than glowing positivity about YouTube influencers draws accusations of having an “axe to grind”. I don’t have any relationship to this person.
> She acknowledged to have used it for literature research,
Right, that’s the problem I was pointing out.
Using ChatGPT for physics research (even if it’s just summarizing papers, though it’s not clear what she meant) is well known to be fraught with hallucinations.
> she has published papers, and she has had a popular physics blog (with people like Peter Shor commenting) for much longer than her YouTube channel.
This is fairly misleading as it’s not hard to see her YouTube channel has found a far larger audience than her physics blog or her academic posts at institutes like the the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.
In the very beginning of the paper she says she’s seeking a new affiliation.
But alas, our universe is more like dS space (positive curvature), not AdS (negative curvature).
Swearing in a research paper is new thing to me. Might pass arxiv pre-published stage but definitely not a peer-reviewed one. But I doubt this will ever get published.
> On the most trivial level, we can infer the mass and charge of a particle from its gravitational field.
How does gravity tell you the charge of a particle? I didn't even know it carries information about the sign of the charge, let alone the magnitude.
Also, the reference to “known links between the solutions of Yang-Mills theory and those of gravity” (Y-M equations describing charge and EM field) seems to speculatively imply that charge-related information is encoded in the geometry of spacetime, alongside gravitational effects
Perhaps you can just assume a radius where the electron self-repulsion energy equals its own mass, by m = E/(c^2).
If you interpret this as a story, say “approximate quantum gravity lives on a matter x geometry product manifold; when the Schrödinger flow wants to leave that manifold, pick the closest product-like pointer state, and bias the lottery to match |a|^2”, it’s internally tidy. As a theory that is local, parameter-free, and predictive, it’s not there:
- the state-space restriction is inconsistent with known gravitational DOFs
- the “derivation” of Born’s rule is circular
- the collapse is enforced by global endpoint selection rather than local dynamics
- and the one quantitative lever (the “Penrose phase”) depends on gauge/UV-sensitive self-potentials
Interesting essay; not yet a model you can falsify without importing the very knobs it claims to avoid.
I don't really have a point here, shitty people can do good things, humanity sure runs the gamut huh?
[0]: https://youtu.be/miJbW3i9qQc?t=2794 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyU5Xkk6TuE
Probably sums up what the book would be complaining about. No experience, didn't actually do any fact checking, makes claims we are supposed to just believe and call it science.
Second video doesnt seem to have any content from the book either.
Color me surprised.
Glass houses heh?
And the book is a pile of trash
Thats Sabines whole position about the attack on science (Ive not read her book, but have watched her videos)
Science doesn't care if the person making nuclear bombs is a sex pest.
And : Second video
First video seemingly was just to show she did indeed write for that book
And wait - you've not read the book? But you are here defending it ? Want to take a stwp back and think about what you're doing here? And second video moght be a good start.
Im criticising the idea that scientific findings can be undermined with accusations of undesirable sexual preference.
They cant, to think they can and try to do so is stupidity of the highest order, I would have loked an actual review of the book, even though i didnt expect to find, nor did i find one in the sources.
The only reason I checked the sources was to confirm that stupidity continued in the sources and that they contained nothing of value.
Could you clarify if you are saying there was anything other than a lot of logical falicies known as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Or if the only criticisms of the book are logical falicies.
Edit0: cant reply further somehow. This isnt a debate and the only supported claims you have done are that you didnt read the book or watch the videos - your claims are moot. I recommend the feeling of grass in the palm of the hand.
Not 100% clear if you agree or disagree, but the way this works now, is short of any further criticism that isnt a logical fallacy, is just assume you agree with the book and have no valid criticism of it.
Thanks for the recommendation, think I'll grab a copy and read it for myself. Just about to finish deaths end and was wondering what to read next.
Anyone that has to resort to ad hominems already lost the argument.
> Hossenfelder's more recent content has received criticism for her attacks on academic research[13][14] and for conspiracy theory-style portrayals of the physics community.
(The author recently had their affiliation end with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and is not happy about it.)
I don't know remotely enough to comment on the author's statements or research, or on the contents of this document, but I would advise caution on getting too excited over significant developments that haven't yet been peer reviewed.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2304/
I've watched Hossenfelder's videos for years and whilst yes - she might perhaps be overly critical of a lot of things - I don't at all accept that she has weird, conspirational leanings.
Sure, but then again neither are arguments from authority. The thing is that we're not practicing the scientific method here on HN in general. Yes, from time to time on specific tech topics there have been cases we're posters have actually gone out right then and there and tried to replicate something or test an idea. But mostly we're a talk shop, not in a bad way but fact is most real world tests and experiments aren't conducive time-wise to the amount of time a typical discussion topic stays active. Actually practicing science for real is very expensive in both time and money and requires specific niche skills few possess. It's the work of a broad network of people over months, years an decades.
So we're left depending to a significant agree on evaluating authorities and what they're saying. Which is fun, but let's not confuse where we stand here. And while argument ad hominem is a fallacy against any stronger form of argument, it can be a perfectly logically reasonable argument against argument from authority. If someone says they are a licensed doctor practicing in a specific area of medicine, and that therefore the recommendation they're making about medicine in that area of expertise is worth paying more attention to, then it's very relevant whether they are telling the truth about their credentials or not, whether they seem to be reasonably sane, etc. We're left with proxy measures, but that can't be helped. We all have to economize and stand on each other's shoulders when it comes to advanced knowledge and technologies.
People have lives outside of pursuing the scientific method. To decide to engage in that pursuit means taking away time and energy from other parts of life.
The argument here then is not that the paper is wrong because of who wrote it, but instead they insinuate that it probably is, and so it likely isn't even worth the time to try and evaluate whether it is.
This is a subtle but crucial difference, as this makes the core argument a speculation rather than a straight claim, let alone a scientific claim or refutation. And so for this, the identity of the author is a crucial bit, ad hominem cannot apply.
And this is if we make the ridiculous assumption that this was any more than just someone's informal opinion, like some sort of formal argument rather.
She's been leaning very hard into clickbait and the shitty science journalist tactic of titles that obfuscate the lack of credibility of a claim, which is certainly unbecoming of a "real" scientist (mostly why I don't follow her content the way I do, say, PBS Space Time), I don't know if I'd say that's a conspiracy theory style portrayal though.
Personally, I dislike her from the path her videos have taken in recent years, but that Wikipedia article is tepid water.