Sabine Hossenfelder: Big Bang and multiverse are not science – 10/07/2023 – Science

German Sabine Hossenfelder, 47, says she felt a little depressed after publishing her first book. “Lost in Math”, from 2018, makes public the series of disappointments and criticisms that she accumulated in her area of ​​study, theoretical physics.

“I felt like I needed to write because someone had to say those things”, he says in an interview with Sheet. “But it was a pretty negative thing to do.”

The researcher at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies then delved into her thoughts to remember what had led her to the field of theoretical physics in the first place.

It was the desire to understand how the world works – but not at the level of society, people or things. She wanted to go deeper, until she got to the particles from which everything else is made and which, in theory, can explain anything that happens in the Universe.

From there came his second book, “Does Science Have All the Answers?”, which Contexto is now publishing in Brazil. In it, Hossenfelder seeks to explain in a didactic way several of the most popular topics in physics, such as the origin of the Universe and quantum theories.

Used to promoting science on her YouTube channel, where she has more than 1 million subscribers, the author has no difficulty addressing dry issues in common language and full of analogies. What she can’t do, however, is leave criticism aside.

“Many scientific popularizers try to dazzle people, especially in cosmology. Everything about the beginning of the Universe and quantum theories is full of ‘wow!’, of great mysteries”, he says.

“But I think people are partly confused and partly disappointed when they discover that most of it is nonsense. And I want people to know the truth. I want them to know what’s really going on in physics, how much we know, and what It’s blah blah.”

Big Bang? Blah blah blah. Multiverse? Blah blah blah.

Or, to use the book’s fancy formulation: “This isn’t science. It’s religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics.”

The author argues that, in many fields of research, there is still not enough data for scholars to reach a conclusion; In many others, such as the most remote past, it may never be possible to make observations capable of supporting a hypothesis.

In any of these cases, she says, what researchers are doing when they defend certain theories cannot even be called science, due to the impossibility of evidence showing whether the theories are right or wrong.

“But it’s not like it’s all nonsense,” he says in the interview. “There is some good research going on and there are big questions about how much we can actually discover. We should talk about this honestly, making it clear what science can discover and what it cannot.”

Hossenfelder knows that his harsh criticisms don’t make friends and, worse, have been used by enemies of science to reinforce denialism. As if it were possible to point at it and say: “You see, science is all bullshit!”

“I don’t know if there’s any way to fix this. No matter what you do, there will always be people who jump to conclusions and attribute opinions to you. The best I can do is explain that there are subtleties,” he says.

Not only should she be careful; in fact, she thinks it is researchers who should be clearer with the public about the limits of their studies.

What are the chances of this happening? It should be almost zero. Hossenfelder states that scientists in these more fundamental areas tend to deny the existence of any bias in their research, as if the objectivity of a particle could eliminate the subjectivity of those who study it.

“I think it’s worrying, especially in physics, that people say, ‘We’re completely rational and we’re just talking about how the world is.’ I think, ‘You have no idea how the human brain works,'” he says.

Even seemingly distant aspects of the laboratory can influence decisions about research, she says; If the press, the cinema, the entire community is talking about a topic, more people will be excited about that specific path, even if it is a dead end.

Bias can also work in reverse. A woman in a masculine field – around 95% of subscribers to her channel are men – she has always felt less integrated with others.

“That might be part of the reason I’ve been looking at things a little differently. Or is it just coincidence? Who knows?”

What she knows is that she doesn’t like being invited to events simply because she is a woman; she prefers her name to come to organizers’ minds on the merits of her research, and not because they want some gender balance at the table.

She says that, more than once, they explicitly said that she was being invited because she was a woman.

“Now that I think about it, these invitations tend to come from Brazil… Don’t take it personally, it could just be a coincidence,” says Hossenfelder. “I don’t find that particularly flattering. In fact, it’s a bit of an insult.”