Sabine Hossenfelder
@skdh
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German Physicist. Author of "Lost in Math" & "Existential Physics". Creator of "Science with Sabine". rt's/shares/likes are not endorsements
Germany
Joined November 2007
I don't understand why this nonsense ever spread so far or why anyone is taking it seriously, but if you need someone to say it's all nonsense, here we go: it's all nonsense.
Terrence Howard is on some esoteric stuff when speaking to Joe Rogan about the periodic table of elements and its relationship with sound. Can anyone verify what he's saying?
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And the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics does not go to physics. .
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I wrote my PhD thesis about "Large Extra Dimensions". I didn't want to use the abbreviation LED, so I called them LXD. When I moved to Arizona -- almost exactly 20 years ago -- I got "LXD" as my licence plate. This is me at age 28.
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50,000 astrophysicists: "The universe is 13.7 billions years old.". One guy in a press release: "Maybe it's 26.7 billion years?". Twitter: SEE I TOLD YOU ALL OF SCIENCE IS WRONG!.
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The ongoing bird-flu disaster in the US is blowing my mind. They're causing a new pandemic, scientists have been jumping up and down for almost a year yelling DO SOMETHING, but no one listens.
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I've said it before but I'll say it again: phasing out nuclear power was the dumbest thing the Germans have ever done.
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friend told me that the jeans he's been wearing for the past 20 years are going to be discontinued by the manufacturer, so he went and bought two dozen pairs and says they'll last for the rest of his life.
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breakthrough: string theorists have found way to calculate pi.
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Everyone who thinks the world could just stop using fossil fuels on the snap of a finger should have a look at this chart. More than 80% of the world's energy supply presently comes from oil, gas, and coal, and that number has barely changed in the past decade. Of course we will
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I see a lot of confusion about Google's Monday press release about quantum supremacy, so let me try to clarify a few things. They say they did a computation on a ca 100 qubit chip much faster than a conventional (super)computer could do. The particular calculation in question is.
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The trouble with society is that the most reasonable people are also the most quiet.
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seriously struggling to comprehend the total and utter detachment from reality one must have to think that a PhD thesis about the description of smell in the English literature will be "one of the most influential theses of the 21st century"
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News are erupting in Germany that the parliament's decision to go through with the nuclear phase-out was partly based on false information that seems to have been deliberately falsified.
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Submitted a laTex doc to a physics journal and they wrote back to say please send a word doc. What's the world coming to?.
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Finally a topic I can speak about competently! Speed limits on German highways. Or rather the absence thereof. This seems to be a thing of eternal fascination for Americans. Yes it's true that German highways don't have speed limits -- in some stretches. Yes, it's true that in.
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The easiest way to see that gravity is not a force is to note that a force causes acceleration, but gravity does not. Acceleration is measurable with a device called an accelerometer. Acceleration is not relative (like velocity), it's absolute. If you are standing on the.
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so yesterday we had this guy come to our house because the city is trying (for the 3rd time) to put fibre optics cables in the road. he tells me that fibre optics cables are great because they're "completely lossless". Of course not, I say, more baffled than anything. He insists.
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This makes me feel incredibly uneasy. Not because of its content, which is kind of unobjectionable, but because it's the same vibe I get from flat earthers and climate change deniers.
New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science.
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I understand that some people believe in God, but I don't understand how they manage to do that.
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It's me, the woman with a PhD in physics who has to look up whether the anode or cathode is the positive thing each and every time.
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Seeing that Zuckerberg wants to introduce Community Notes and YouTube is allegedly trialling something similar, I predict it will be a spectacular failure and in a few years you'll understand why I said this. Collective intelligence is a nice idea but it's fraught with.
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If it looks like someone didn't do their job.If it looks like someone didn't see the obvious.If it looks like someone didn't react when they should.If it looks like someone's plan didn't work out.It's not because it was staged .But because real life isn't a movie.
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The problem I have with Greta is that when I was her age, I was exactly like that.
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How I fell out of love with academia . (this video was an accidental publication/scheduling blunder😬😬 but well uh, happy Friday I guess).
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The next three months will be decisive for climate change. It's because most climate scientists expect the global average temperature to decrease. If that doesn't happen, that makes it likely that the existing projections are underestimating future warming. The past year has
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this is so good, I may just literally print it out and pin it to the wall
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I wish that everyone who followed the #LK99 ups and downs, the "Yes it works!" excitement switching to "It's all wrong" disappointment and back understood that this is how doing science is ALL THE TIME, it's just that often the stakes aren't that high & you don't get to see it.
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I started my first postdoc position in the US in early January 2004, the date was on the scholarship letter that came from a German agency. Alas, the Americans thought 01/09 would be September 1st rather than January 9. They were very surprised to see me.
A map of every country in the world using a MM/DD/YYYY date format.
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Einstein never "denied" quantum mechanis. He accepted it as a useful model to describe observations, he merely thought that it was an approximation of a deeper yet-to-be-found theory. Or as he put it, it was "incomplete". I think he was right.
@skdh Einstein won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect and then spent his entire life denying quantum mechanics.
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And you know what he blocked me for? For pointing out that his attempt at dictating others what they're allowed to say is fuelling the fires of climate change deniers.
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This is what happens when a quantum wave-function hits a wall that it does not have enough energy to cross. Part of it goes through anyway. This is the famous "tunnel-effect". A particle without quantum properties cannot do that.
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Hiding likes was a good move by @elonmusk. I "like" posts not necessarily to say that I agree, but to say that I value the post, even if I disagree. Other people use the like-option differently. This inevitably leads to misunderstandings. I am glad it's no longer possible.
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I've been working on a video about net zero -- what is it, how will we get there, how far are we along the way, etc. Just finished recording. Research has been extremely depressing. In an nutshell, every serious source (incl the IPCC) agrees that there's no way we'll reach net.
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We talk about rich people and poor people, left-leaning people and right-leaning people, smart people and, well, not so smart people. But I have come to think that to understand what's happening in the world, a much more important distinction is that between people people and.
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let me be honest with you: increasingly I have days when I think everything I read is bullshit, why bother.
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I've been telling physicists in the foundations for more than 10 years they need to get their act together or their future looks bleak. There have been too many unobserved particles, too many idiotic headlines about multiverses, too many expensive experiments that didn't find.
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About 10 years ago, I was on a PhD committee. It wasn't until the evening before the defence that I made my way through the thesis. The student was not a native English speaker, his grammar was very creative, and it was tough going. In chapter 2 the English grammar dramatically.
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If you want to understand modern physics -- or really any abstract ideas -- you have to take it for what it is and stop trying to understand it through something else like it. There isn't anything else like it. This is the problem with well-indended analogies like the rubber.
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AGI or not, any system capable of logical reasoning in verbal form, identifying logical fallacies and biases will change the world dramatically & very quickly.
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I've been doing my weekly Science News for about 4 months now. I have literally read thousands of press releases to that end. The major insight that I have taken away from this is to never, ever, trust a press release.
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I really feel like there are a lot of people who cannot grasp why climate change is such a big problem, people who are like "ah, cmon, we'll just all buy air conditioning". You must have seen them here on twitter before: It's the "climate's always been changing" type who thinks.
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The idea of dark matter is that a single constant (the initial value of the energy density) explains tons of data. It's a simple hypothesis with extraordinary explanatory power. If you had a million wrong sums with a +1 missing, what would you conclude?.
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I wish that everyone who condemns the morals of earlier generations would keep in mind that coming generations will almost certainly condemn our morals, too.
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This is a bad idea. Science is not a democracy. The more scientists you poll on a topic the fewer of them will actually understand the topic. Collect arguments, not opinions.
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You all know that I was born in Frankfurt, which has one of the busiest airports in Europe, but you probably don't know that I went to school with a lot of children of asylum seekers. You see, many of the asylum seekers who arrived at the Frankfurt airport at the time were.
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Going forward, I will block everyone who comes with stupid comments of the sort that I am not allowed to comment on politics or anything besides physics for that matter. If you don't like what I say, don't follow me.
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When Roger Penrose came out with the idea that the human brain uses quantum effects in microtubules and that was the origin of consciousness, I thought the idea was a little crazy. Well, maybe it wasn't that crazy after all.
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my 17 years-old self would be proud of my 47 years-old self, what more can I aspire to?
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Since it's fashionable at the moment, maybe I should launch my own party and run for chancellor. I'll bring back nuclear power and outlaw fax machines!.
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Got my hair cut yesterday and the woman with the scissors asked what I've been up to lately. I said I wrote a book about physics and she told me that women aren't good at physics because they can't think logically. Possibly I'm a physicist b/c as kid I used to cut my hair myself.
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My mum didn't want to buy me a Barbie doll when I was a child. Eventually I bought one from my pocket money. I really liked the many movable parts. ➡️ Don't be afraid to let your daughter play with a Barbie doll, she might still end up being a physicist.
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Well those who complained yesterday that the physics Nobel was really about engineering should be pleased today that the chemistry Nobel is really about physics.
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Interesting (and slightly worrying) trends of scientific publications by topic in the USA, normalized to 2010. You see that blue dropping line at the bottom? That's physics. The two most steeply rising ones? Psychology and social sciences.
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"Guten Tag", literally "good day", is the German any-purpose greeting. You probably knew that. Less well known is that if you use it in case it's obviously not a greeting -- because you've already greeted the person -- it means either "fuck you" or "piss off", depending on.
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Sometimes I come across a paper on an idea I have long ago explained is nonsense, even published a paper laying out why that is so, but people just continue publishing more nonsense on it. Academia is so fucking broken and I'm so fucking tired of it.
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Got another seminar invitation today that said they invited me because I'm a woman. I said no. I want to give seminars to people who are interested in my work, not in my gender.
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Reading news about this year's #NobelPrize in physics. I haven't yet found a single article (!) that actually gets it right. This is incredibly depressing.
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Lots of climate activists urgently need to wake up and accept that at this point the only realistic way to limit global warming is massive amounts of carbon dioxide removal, everywhere, all at once. And, yes, that will also make it possible to continue using fossil fuels.
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My life made a little detour in 2008 when I was shortlisted for a postdoc position at the Santa Fe Institute and went for a job interview. I did at the time seriously consider switching to economics (partly because of recent events). Eventually I just barely didn't get the job,.
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Scotland ditches its super ambitious climate plans. Many other nations will follow. Most of these plans are bullshit and we all know it. Time to get real.
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US-Americans like to brag about how great their democracy is, alas, according to the Economist Democracy Index (2023) the USA is not even ranked a full democracy any more, but a "flawed democracy", well behind most European countries (and Canada).
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In the past decade I have seen the media rewriting history by declaring that: . (a) the fossil fuel industry "knew" of climate change already in the 1970s and yet those bad people kept the secret from us and that . (b) climate scientists have said all along along that carbon.
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A scary thought I had the other day. You know how climate scientists keep warning that this ocean circulation in the Atlantic (the AMOC) might collapse and that this could cool mid & north Europe by several degrees Celsius?. Well, if the AMOC collapses (which looks increasingly.
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The black hole information loss paradox really shouldn't be called that way. The word "information" in this context doesn't mean what most people (even in physics) thinks it means. All it means is that the process seems to be fundamentally irreversible: You cannot infer the.
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Fun fact: In Germany it's a criminal offense to insult a German politician. This law does not apply to foreign politicians.
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For all I can tell, the US presidential election comes down to supporters of two groups insisting that the leader of the other group has dementia.
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I don't know why everyone wants me to comment on the nuclear fusion news. It's all well and fine and a great experimental achievement and all, but as I've said before, that's energy in and out of the reaction, not the entire system. Great science, but far from application.
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If I write a paper and you write a paper, each of us has one paper. If we each agree to put each other as a co-author on the paper, now each of us has two papers. Lots of academics figure this out very quickly.
Gonna dig in here. 5 papers written by a group of 5 people shoudn't be worth so much more than the exact same 5 papers each written independently by 1 of the 5 people. But the way we count things, it really is.
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It's Tuesday and someone who calls themselves "ecosocialist" just declared me an "antiscientific climate denier". If you call everyone who you dislike a science denier, the word will soon have lost any meaning, much like "transphobic" and "racist".
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meanwhile on facebook: a link to a page that questions the existence of objective reality is flagged for nudity
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I have to admit, Musk did a really good job at making Zuckerberg look likeable.
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We need to stop obsessing about the perceived shortcomings or virtues of individuals. The relevant changes in human society are systemic. Individuals rise or fall in that system. If it's not one of them, it'll be another. The real stories aren't Trump or Thunberg or Musk, the.
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I don't really care whether an AI is "truly intelligent" -- whatever that might mean. If it solves our problems, that's good enough for me.
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It's great that 80% of all people want more action on climate change. >99% of them also want to pay fewer taxes. Polls like this would make much more sense if they'd ask people what they'd be willing to sacrifice.
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I seem to have reached an age where physics textbooks become a welcome escape from dystopian headlines
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I know it's weird, but it bothers me that the world is running out of Helium.
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Deciding to phasing out nuclear power is the dumbest thing Germans have done past WWII. It's about time the Green party lives up to its name and realizes that times have changed.
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New conspiracy theory just dropped. "The elites" are creating hurricanes in hurricane season and sending them to Florida to interfere with democracy. Next up "the elites" will turn the leaves on trees yellow and make them fall off. Evil people!
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Getting older has slowed down my brain. It's noticeable. So far, I have found it to be a good thing because it's made it easier for me to focus and my mental health has much improved. But it also worries me, as I don't know how it will further develop.
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This is the maybe most surprising development in theoretical physics I’ve seen for a decade. A well-renown physicist is saying that there’s a mistake in a proof that dates back half a century, and black holes might not actually contain singularities.
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