Sabine Hossenfelder - Lost in Math

Sabine's book, Lost in Math published in 2018.


See Rebecca Smethurst on the Crisis in Cosmology. Here's an interview on the subject of the book:


At 16 minutes 27 seconds on aesthetics in a theory. I think you should worry first and foremost about whether or not it works, otherwise you are not doing empirical science.

At 19 minutes 19 seconds on whether there would be better ways to advance physics other than by building the next generation of super high-energy particle collider. This is similar to military spending and it's really just an artefact of Keynesian monetary theory: that you can create 'wealth' by employing men to dig holes in the road and fill them up again. Of course you are not creating real wealth, you are destroying it and creating fake money. The upshot is that the better ways of spending much, much less money on encouraging sound scientific teaching and research are not of any interest, because they don't employ nearly so many people. So in fact, if that money was not spent on big particle collider experiments, then it simply would not be available to the physics community. I wrote this before I had heard from 28 minutes 51 seconds. The "zero sum" argument is really a negative sum argument, because having spent so much human effort and material resources on these projects the physics community is then 'morally obliged' not to change its ideas in any fundamental ways because of this huge 'tangible' investment they've made studying concrete reality. The net result is that even more is spent to 'prove' that what high-energy particle physicists are studying are the bona fide objects of thought of God Almighty Himself. Then you get Nobel prize-winning physicists such as Steven Weinberg writing books like Facing Up, and guys like Kip Thorne lecturing physics in the nude, where they are clearly saying "OK peeps, it's time to bite the bullet and tell the public that we've been mostly exploring our own intellectual back-passages for three-quarters of a century, ... so learn to be able to laugh at yourself, or you're going to have a very miserable retirement." But then, when asked "Whence come the laws of Nature?" talking like this on interviews:


And Sean Carroll, at 2 minutes 30 seconds says that what really exists is a quantum mechanical wave-function!


See also:


At 5 minutes 38 seconds, on using high-precision measurements at low energies and the burden of calculating solutions. This is obviously the preferred path to take because the benefits of research into the mathematical and computational techniques developed would be shared amongst many disciplines. See The Right Way to Formalise Mathematics, Edsger W. Dijkstra on Reasoning about Processes and Ben Eater on Running a Breadboard at 1MHz.

And here's a timely contribution from Academy of Ideas:


See Destin on Re-engineering Supply Chains.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stefan Molyneux on Resource Based Economy

Image
This is an interesting discussion. What most people don't realise is that capitalism as we practice it now wastes 99.9% of the human and material resources we currently use. Once you realise that, the problems raised by the idea of gift or resource-based economies become much more tractable. At  10 minutes 30 seconds  the discussion turns to the way we treat our family and friends differently. We don't charge our nearest and dearest. At this point Molyneux brings in Neo-Darwinian evolution to explain why there is this difference between the way we treat our kith and kin to the way we treat everybody else. I guess he will go on to argue that this is because we evolved to be like this, otherwise we would not have survived. He will presumably say that this is human nature and because it is genetically determined, nothing we can do short of a programme of eugenics and euthenasia will change that. Well, ... you know what my answer to that will be, ... something along the lines:
Read more

Nikola Tesla and the End of The World

Image
At  1 minute 21 seconds  the building in the background, in Trafalgar Square , as she says "There is a story in our family that my great grandfather worked with Nikola Tesla, ..." is ... ... what? Hint: it is near to a statue of George Washington, a replica donated by the  Commonwealth of Virginia in 1921 .  See  War Crimes . Watch all four episodes of  Nikola Tesla and the End of The World  and then watch this: And on the meaning of the word sovereignty see: On the Mason-Dixon Line, the "boundary of slavery" in the American colonies, it might be insightful to compare the  Britannica  and  Wikipedia  entries and see where they differ. Then, especially if you're my daughter, see  On Feminist Genealogy . Then see this documentary about Mark Knopfler and what motivates his music. There's a nice bit at  17 minutes  about where songs come from, and what happens to their origin, and the role of Town Planners like my father, in this process, part
Read more