294. Sabine Hossenfelder — Existential Physics (1)
1 (9s):
You're listening to the Michael Shermer shuttle.
Wondrium (15s):
Hello everyone. It's Michael Shermer and it's time for another edition episode of the Michael Shermer show brought to you by one dream them one dream is a series of college level, audio and video courses and documentaries produced and distributed by the teaching company Wondery and brings you engaging educational content through short form videos, long form courses, tutorials, how to lessons, travelogues documentaries and more covering every topic you've ever wondered about. And many you've probably never even know you didn't know much about this is my favorite company. Here's the course I'm taking at at the moment. You just, as you know, on your app, you just open it up and there's hundreds of courses to choose from.
Wondrium (59s):
This one is called Gnosticism from nag Hammadi to the gospel of Judas. Did you know there was a gospel of Judas? I did not know that. So these are 24 30 minute lectures, for example, rediscovering gnosis who were the Gnostics, narcissism and creation, sin and salvation Judas as a Gnostic tragic hero. I haven't heard that one yet. That'll be good. Gnostic Bible stories, the feminine in Gnostic myth, you know, the original feminists really were first century Gnostics God and creation in the ballon Tinian myth. And so on all the way down to narcissism in the modern imagination, I would add that that Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word agnostic because he said the Gnostics, not quite the same people, but in that general vein are certain that they know.
Wondrium (1m 51s):
And he was certain, he did not know. Not that he knew that there is no God, just that it's not possible to know. And that's where the word agnosticism comes from. Anyway, check it out. If you go to one dream.com/schermer, you get a free trial two weeks and 20% off the annual subscription rate. So it's a great deal. You can consume all the content you want. Endlessly. I probably spend at least an hour a day on one dream products, along with audio books and so forth for my couple of hours a day of working out, driving and whatnot. It's a great way to consume content. Check it out, go to skeptic.com/schermer get your free trial. And you're at 20% discount and it supports the podcast. And if you appreciate our work, then that helps.
Wondrium (2m 32s):
Thank you
0 (2m 43s):
Just to remind you, I am the publisher of this magazine skeptic. This is our latest issue. Volume 27. Number two on abortion matters. The previous issue was on trans matters. The next one that comes out in about a month is on race matters in our fourth one for the year is on nationalism matters.
1 (3m 1s):
So as you can see, we are reaching out to new topics. Non-controversial topics, go to skeptic.com and look under click under magazine. If you want to subscribe or go to your local bookstore, skeptic should be available in every bookstore in north America. And you'll notice those who watch the show. You usually see behind me the original artwork for the cover of my first book. Why people believe where things I got bored seen that you're probably bored seen at. So I have some new artwork here. This is the cover of the second fourth issue of our history showing appropriately enough for today's guest Nicholas Copernicus. And we did a whole issue on scientific revolutions and what drives them and what, how people thought differently back then that artwork is by my partner, the late pat Lindsay who died one year ago this month.
1 (3m 50s):
So as a tribute to her, there's her original artwork. I have a whole stack of them here back in the days when artists used to actually make paintings for magazine covers. Now it's all done digitally online. So we don't have any more of the original artwork, but I have a stack of them when we're moving our office. I will show some of that to you. Okay. My guest today is Abena Haas and Felder, or she's a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of advanced studies in Germany and has published more than 80 research articles about the foundations of physics, including quantum gravity, physics beyond the standard model, dark matter and quantum foundations. She has written about physics for a broad audience for 15 years, and is the creator of the popular YouTube channel science without the gobbly goop share writing has been published in new scientists, scientific American, the New York times, the guardian in London and her first book lost in math.
1 (4m 46s):
How beauty leads physics astray appeared in 2018 to being a nice to see you. Thanks for coming on the show here is the cover of the new book, existential physics, the scientist's guide to life's biggest questions. I listened to the whole thing on audio. It's a great book, really fun. Really well-written by the way, congratulations on reaching 500,000 people on your YouTube channel. That's astonishing.
2 (5m 10s):
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm also astonished. Honestly,
1 (5m 15s):
You are. Y
2 (5m 16s):
Yeah, it wasn't exactly the plan of my life, but yeah, I mean, you know, you'd have to work with a task that comes less than post.
1 (5m 29s):
Well, no, I think it's a, it's a real tribute to me. It's a sign that enough, a lot of people, well, half a million people to be exact care about what physics is telling us, regular folks that are non physicist. And you seem to be really good at that. Give us just a brief rundown of your, your life path as it were, how you came to be interested in physics in the first place, and then how you went down this other path of doing, you know, public intellectual activities like that.
2 (5m 56s):
I studied mathematics and I had a hard time deciding what mathematics to focus on. And I eventually decided I would focus on that mathematics, which is good to describe the world. And that naturally led me to physics. So I started out being very interested in the RG bras and their representations and do Rocky equation and quantum gravity at, at the time Ashley car had just introduced his variables. And for one or two years, I was under the impression that quantum gravity had been settled and you know, it, it had all been done.
2 (6m 39s):
So there was somewhat of a misjudgment as I figured out later. Yeah. So I did my master's thesis on Hawking radiation, black holes, and then my PhD on the possibility that the large Hadron Collider could produce mini black holes. It was very popular at the time. And then I became a little bit disenchanted with this whole business because I realized it probably wasn't going to up on that the large Hadron Collider would make those things. And there was no reason to think it would happen. And the same was the case for supersymmetry and not other kinds of things that particular physicists had put forward.
2 (7m 22s):
And this was for me, the reason why I stopped working on the phenomenology of prodigal physics at the LHC and instead started working on the phenomenology of quantum gravity. But it was also the reason why I wrote my first book, because I, I felt kind of someone how to say it, that there was no reason the LHC was going to see anything besides the Hicks and anything new besides the eggs. I mean, not counting all those resonances and, you know, composite particles that aren't the kind of stuff. I mean, no fundamentally new particles. And so far I've been correct, I guess we'll see what happens.
2 (8m 6s):
Yeah. I've for a long time now I've been employed at research institutes, not universities. I was at the perimeter Institute in Waterloo, in Canada, and then I was at Nandita in Stockholm. And now I'm at the Franklin Institute for advanced studies. None of those positions come with teaching duties. And so I, I felt that, you know, I have a mission to communicate research and if it's not in teaching, then I do public outreach and it goes together naturally with my interest in writing, I've always been interested in writing.
2 (8m 45s):
And so I guess one that to the other, how I ended up being on YouTube, that's another story had something to do with this pandemic going on.
1 (8m 55s):
Yes, indeed. Right. Everybody has home studios now and can produce reasonably quality content. I watched last night, your 500 or where your episode is celebrating your 500,000 followers. This one was called science with gobbly goop. And I don't know if you know this, but you know, one of your comments was on the so-called hoax and then the conceptual penis hoax. I don't know if you know this, but we published skeptic published the conceptual penis hoax. Pete Pagosa is a good friend who was one of the three that orchestrated that. And here is an excerpt from that paper. And then I'll, I'll ask you to comment on this kind of jargon ish language toxic hyper-masculinity derives its significance directly from the conceptual penis and applies itself to supporting Neo capitalist materialism, which is a fundamental driver of climate change, especially in the rampant use of carbon emitting, fossil fuel technologies and careless domination of Virgin natural environments.
1 (9m 56s):
We need not delve deeply into the criticisms of dialectical objectivism or the relationship with masculine tropes, like the conceptual penis to make effective criticism of exclusionary, dialectical, objectivism, all perspectives matter. Anyway, it goes on and on like this for, you know, pages and pages. And I commissioned as Alan so-called to write a piece for us to put the conceptual penis hoax into the larger context of history. There's been a lot of these kind of hoaxes. I had no idea his was just, you know, the one, the most famous one in the nineties. But I think one of the criticisms that I heard heard against us and Pete, and then against so-called is what's the difference between the kind of jargon you read and in, and in post-modern literary journals and the kind of stuff you write in physics journals, which is impenetrable to people that are outside of the field.
1 (10m 48s):
How would I, how would I know the difference between this bullshit and you're just using technical language.
2 (10m 54s):
That's a very good question. And I'm afraid sometimes there isn't much of a difference. You know, what physicists do is they wrap all their stories up in mathematics. And I think this deters a lot of people from criticizing them because they're like, oh, I don't understand how those equations work and so on and so forth. But I do understand them. And I can tell you that in, in many cases is just throwing together terminology pretty much like the stuff with the capitalism and the toxic masculinity, whatever, then you do some calculation, you can always calculate something and you can get it published.
2 (11m 35s):
And I'm, I'm hugely disturbed that this is going on and that businesses tolerated. And so, as you, as you can tell, as you can probably guess, I haven't made many friends by saying this kind of thing.
1 (11m 50s):
Yes, they tolerate it well, is it that they just, no one has time to push back or deal with the, you know, pay to play journals and that kind of stuff.
2 (11m 60s):
Yeah. Th that's one part of the story, as it's been said, many times it's much easier to generate nonsense papers than it is to debunk them. And a lot of people eventually come to the conclusion I've reached the same conclusion that it's just not a good investment of your time. There are just so many ridiculously bad papers that are getting, getting, getting published, gotten that, get published it. So why would you waste your time trying to debunk them? It's much easier to ignore them. And I have some sympathy for that. I mean, it's the pragmatic approach, but it, it just makes the problem worse because those people see that you can get it published.
