"I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research
as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote
it myself."
Sabine Hossenfelder has been on what I'd call a 'physics crank' arc of late.
Believing her one expertise can be substituted for another in fields like sociology and economics. I expect this paper to fit that mold, rather than being a return to the academy.
I'd be happy to be wrong in this case, but I'm rather skeptical.
Unfortunately, I lack the qualifications to speak to the merits one way or another.
Sabine Hossenfelder these days is a YouTube personality, who likes to discuss subjects she's not an expert in. I don't know if that's the metric for "crank", but anything I hear from her is taken with a massive grain of salt.
It often seems to me that a person's opinion on a subject is judged particularly harsh and derisively the more they are deemed an expert on some other unrelated subject. I find this a little unfair.
Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on this. To paraphrase; she says she notices a subject people are talking about but she's not an expert in, and so she accesses some recent papers on the subject, ideally including a literature review, reads them, considers everything she's read together and forms an opinion.
I ask you, what else you expect anyone else to do? Isn't this exactly a scientific process? and anything else amounts to gatekeeping.
(quick edit: I'm all for taking everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt though, even peer reviewed papers shouldn't be taken uncritically)
The description she gives of what she is doing is a stellar example of good scientific inquiry.
The problem, or at least my perception of the situation, is that she does not do what she claims to be doing. She forms uninformed opinions optimized to be engaging, interesting, and conspiratorial, instead of boring sound interpretations of what she has read.
The sad thing is that the only way for someone reading this to know whether I am gatekeeping or warning about an actual crank is to do all of this work from scratch yourself.
(I easily concede that there are plenty of problems with the institution of "Science" today -- I just think she exploits the existence of these problems to aggrandize herself instead of engage in fixing them in a productive way)
I also understand she is considered controversial as she's been criticizing the scientific community, mostly on how they get funding and how they pick research direction.
“We know from Bell’s theorem [7, 8] that any locally causal
model that correctly describes observations needs to violate
measurement independence. Such theories are sometimes
called ‘superdeterministic’ [9, 10]. It is therefore clear that
to arrive at a local collapse model, we must use a superdeterministic approach.”
I only got the first 1/2 of my physics degree before moving on to CS, but to me this reads as “We know eternal life can only be obtained from unicorn blood, so for this paper we must use a fairytale approach.”
"deterministic", "superdeterministic", "measurement independence", "local", "causal" and more are well defined terms (with potentially poorly chosen names) in quantum information science and "quantum foundations". She is a crank, but a paragraph like that can be found in essays by well-respected mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists.
No co-authors but...
"I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote it myself."
Sabine Hossenfelder has been on what I'd call a 'physics crank' arc of late. Believing her one expertise can be substituted for another in fields like sociology and economics. I expect this paper to fit that mold, rather than being a return to the academy.
I'd be happy to be wrong in this case, but I'm rather skeptical. Unfortunately, I lack the qualifications to speak to the merits one way or another.
Sabine Hossenfelder these days is a YouTube personality, who likes to discuss subjects she's not an expert in. I don't know if that's the metric for "crank", but anything I hear from her is taken with a massive grain of salt.
It often seems to me that a person's opinion on a subject is judged particularly harsh and derisively the more they are deemed an expert on some other unrelated subject. I find this a little unfair.
[delayed]
Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on this. To paraphrase; she says she notices a subject people are talking about but she's not an expert in, and so she accesses some recent papers on the subject, ideally including a literature review, reads them, considers everything she's read together and forms an opinion.
I ask you, what else you expect anyone else to do? Isn't this exactly a scientific process? and anything else amounts to gatekeeping.
(quick edit: I'm all for taking everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt though, even peer reviewed papers shouldn't be taken uncritically)
The description she gives of what she is doing is a stellar example of good scientific inquiry.
The problem, or at least my perception of the situation, is that she does not do what she claims to be doing. She forms uninformed opinions optimized to be engaging, interesting, and conspiratorial, instead of boring sound interpretations of what she has read.
The sad thing is that the only way for someone reading this to know whether I am gatekeeping or warning about an actual crank is to do all of this work from scratch yourself.
(I easily concede that there are plenty of problems with the institution of "Science" today -- I just think she exploits the existence of these problems to aggrandize herself instead of engage in fixing them in a productive way)
> Sabine Hossenfelder
She has a popular science channel https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos
I also understand she is considered controversial as she's been criticizing the scientific community, mostly on how they get funding and how they pick research direction.
From little I understood from it in this paper she is basing it off the Penrose QM-GR interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_interpretation
“We know from Bell’s theorem [7, 8] that any locally causal model that correctly describes observations needs to violate measurement independence. Such theories are sometimes called ‘superdeterministic’ [9, 10]. It is therefore clear that to arrive at a local collapse model, we must use a superdeterministic approach.”
I only got the first 1/2 of my physics degree before moving on to CS, but to me this reads as “We know eternal life can only be obtained from unicorn blood, so for this paper we must use a fairytale approach.”
"deterministic", "superdeterministic", "measurement independence", "local", "causal" and more are well defined terms (with potentially poorly chosen names) in quantum information science and "quantum foundations". She is a crank, but a paragraph like that can be found in essays by well-respected mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists.