Physics at the limits of reality | Sabine Hossenfelder in conversation with Hilary Lawson | In full 

I like the fact that Sabine always allows the other person to finish no matter how absurd or provocative they sound.

Some of her answered are “I don’t know”. How often do you hear that statement? She is humble and I like that.

Sabine is a giant! She is so refreshing…seeking answers to ‘how things work’ without an agenda, for our knowledge alone. She is a rare individual, indeed!

Sabine is great in disentangling Hilayr's questions--many of which I have a hard time grasping. When talking with Sabine, one can get a word in edge-wise and get a well-considered response. This interview is a great example of clarity of expression. And why we subscribe to Sabine's channel.

Truly enjoy Sabines outlook and common sense. I also take issue with the theoretical and mathematical views that are unprovable or unobservable. Anything goes with such illogical accepted rhetoric. Thanks Sabine for saying it out loud.

Sabine is so unusual and refreshing in the world of science. She has the rare and unusual ability to continually review the basic reality of the problem as she works through it without getting entangled solely in the numbers or data. Just because the math works doesn't mean it's real

Her position on multiverse, early big bang, etc, made a lot more sense for me in the context of her video on why she left academia

Sabine, you are wonderful. I love your no-nonsense approach to these questions and ideas.

Dear Sabine, I do like your almost impeccable english and coherent stories in fysics. And as an old guy I do take joy in your dry humoristic remarks. And I try to understand your great outlines. So thank you❤.

"The only stupid question is the question you do not ask", I am not so sure. The fact that Sabine can produce coherent answers from a so called non-realist, Philosofer's questions speaks volumes to the nature of Sabine. I love the fact that Sabine sticks to the facts and has an uncanny ability to cut through (insert whatever you want here) and speak intelectually and inteligently in an understandable manner. Sabine is excellent.

Well done Sabine, for avoiding all the traps.

Mathematics theoretical speaking is now like magic, you can makes things work that can never be proven, even so it could lead to other answers? Sabine is an excellent people's scientist and doesn't mind telling it as it is, RU-vid has proved to be s great platform for her, we wish her continued success.

I love Sabine because she actually expresses when she doesn't know, which is SO important for people to express when they are creating knowledge

Sabine is patient with this interviewer

If only I possessed a mere 1% of Sabine's intellect, I would be the happiest person in the known universe!...Sigh...Instead, I'm just a good Ol' average dummie. Thank you for sharing your brilliance with us, Dr. Hossenfelder. 💗

Sabine is really a great Scientist with a capital "S" ! ❤

Mathematics absolutely can mask the unreality of a theory.

An excellent interview, thank you both. I really enjoyed it. I can very much understand Sabine's approach, it's basically "Sticking with the principles of science, if there's something we don't know for sure, we should keep the question open instead of just giving a quick answer of for example, multi verse, that would instead; close the question!".. It's a very elegent defence of the scientific method. Personally, this is my method of, inputting accurate data into my world views, I expect from scientific theories to be at least scientific and not merly philosophical predictions.. or else it'll turn into something like politics and religions. I was always blamed of one thing though for having this stand, and I hoped to hear it from Sabine, that is: "What remains then? If you hate politics, don't believe in psychology, or social sciences (Which I don't really consider it science in the first place), how else would you understand the world?", It's a very fair question, I have to confess, because in my views, human phychology for example, is almost impossible to understand scientifically (in my strict definitions of science), while many the experiments done in psychology come up with huge headlines and leaps even than the 'multi verse' in physics, with very narrow and circumstancial experiments and should for example be a statistical data instead. Two points for the above: * First, is that keeping psychology ascientific (thank you Sabine), will pressure us to identify that this field is really important, and we should actually work on, scientifically find proper methods tackle it, instead of giving false headlines and fake ourselves that we understand much about ourselves. (it is one of the most important fields to really tackle), * Second, is that, unfortunatly, this has kept me skeptic, and unwilling to proceed in learning many of the good ideas coming from these ascientific fields, with adapting these views, I'm left with very narrow-scientific findings as products of natural sciences (plus computer stuff, my area of expertise :D), and per my friends, closing my eyes on other important fields.

They managed to find chairs that are clearly not comfortable for someone who is not tall as well as someone who is not short

Sabine’s poor of view always seems practical but with a depth of thought that I find really interesting. I love listening to her.

Confused why they weren’t insulting each other. I thought this was Between Two Ferns! 😂 Big fan Sabine!

I love Hilary Lawson. Great questions. And not hard to follow at all. Sabine was great too.

Common sense is the key to science with Sabine !!

In most cases: "I don't know" is the best answer.

What a great interview! Thanks for sharing!

Sabine, of course, is exactly right in her criticism about the multiverse, although there are lots of other fashionable ideas beyond that are genuinely ascientific. Science is, after all, the realm of testable predictions. It's a shame that more people in science don't have Sabine's humility. I believe that all great scientists experience humility in the face of nature even if they don't articulate it as such. Einstein, for sure, was such a role model on all of this. I'm pretty sure that Einstein would be very proud of Sabine and her work. We need more people educating the public about science and helping people to see the difference between real science and fashionable self-promotion.

Philosophy is the basics of communication, and the ability to question the world is a philosophy exercise that everyone does but doesn't get recognized as philosophy. Everyone is a philosopher to some degree.

Sabine, keep on being you. Love ur attitude

Thanks for the interview. I've watched Sabine for a while, but was unsure of what set her apart. This interview helped clarify why her work is so attractive.

Never clicked on anything this fast

Ah Sabine, the voice of reason

Could listen to Sabine all day.

Sabine is absolutely right. I've started to follow her because of philosphical interests. I think the measurement problem really is where science hit a limit. And it needs to get a lot more attention. It might be that the universe really is random at a fundamenal level though. Whether it is or isn't has huge implications for philosphy.

This is my favorite Sabine interview!

Sabine is our beloved scientist here on RU-vid. ❤

Sabine is so listenable to.

Sabine is such an awesome human being.

I love Sabine. I always enjoy listening to her clarity and wisdom. She always teaches me something.

Great Sabine!

I liked particularly when she said that mathematics is "art" in a sense...

I love Sabine, she is an actual scientist, unlike those who just chant "trust the science!"

I am a simple wave function. I see Sabine Hossenfelder and I press like with probability 1

Excellent interview and interviewer

Amazing woman Sabine. What efforts she goes to to make science palatable. And she is not afraid to pull punches.

I've only ever heard Sabine speak on specific science papers and topics and never heard how her general approach to questioning the world overlapped in all the ways I've found useful! I love you even more today Sabine

The always excellent Sabine!!

As a bald man, I am deeply envious of Hilary Lawson's hair. It is exquisite.

I imagine this was incredibly frustrating for Hilary. The interview/conversation was masterfully done nonetheless and I enjoyed it a lot.

❤Sabine. For Galileo reality/truth is fully reachable and described by math, for Bellarmino we can only produce models of reality. Forgotting that Bellarmino was right, a lot of scientists are going culturally backward, falling in a neo neo neo positivism 😀

It was interesting to hear Sabine talk about the need for new theoretic development in quantum mechanics, but what is unclear to me is whether there is any currently unexplainable data that would motivate theoretic development.

🌺✨🌺 The comment section here is well worth the read after listening to Sabine.

Kant put this idea to rest a long time ago. He called it an antinomy (sp); it was in his discussion of "first cause". The idea is one is asking a question using set different from the set one is asking the question about. He was saying that one cannot answer a question about first cause, as it is outside of time and space, with the tools of causality which exits in time and space, it simply makes no sense. To put it simply, you can't get there from here. Good for Sabine for holding the line against gobbledygook.

Sabine is an amazing person.

'Open to refutation' is perhaps a more elegant phrase, a la Popper?

I think Sabine is wonderful - and it was academic Physics loss that she’s not a Professor somewhere. A fresh perspective

she's had an ok career but she's clearly not done yet, so eager to see where sabine ends up, love her no nonsense personality

Sabine is definitely a very intelligent scientist

She is realy patient...

Sabine!!!!! ❤❤❤

Wellsaid,Sabina and i agree with you. Not because you're a cute little scientist, well maybe a bit. But i am agreeing with you because you are correct. There is an underlying theory that runs the entire system and its close very close. Hope to see more of Ms Hossenfelder on your programs. Peace ✌️ 😎.

I feel the issue is that the difference between Maths and physics is that Physics is an application of Math, but Math is NOT physics... Hence Mathematical speculations are abstract logical theory which may or may not relate to observable events whereas Physics is observation and explanation of those 'events' - one can fit many mathematical formulae / solution to an event described by a set of data however the event described by the data is a singular event so all the varied mathematical possibilities would likely get more and more constrained with better data till ideally there is only one mathematical solution. Hence math is not reality but can become our best description of reality An example is Newtons gravity which varies with 1/R^2... If R=0 then there is a mathematical singularity... but we accept that because most observations show that mass is not a point mass, it has volume, so below a certain radius eg Earths surface... the formula fails/requires more sophisticated interpretation because the mass is no longer 100% below that R value so gravity in fact reduces from the earths surface to Zero at the centre NOT infinity as the simplistic interpretation of Newtons formula would give... Perhaps Einstein's gravity has some similar limiting case where extension of the simplistic interpretation again 'assuming a point mass' is no longer valid hence again singularities though simplistic mathematical extension into the unknown are 'not real' and there is some other physical concept required that prevents the mathematical singularity - ie. the physical reality will not be a simple extension of the math into an area we have no data.... And hence GR perhaps does NOT fail it just has ranges of applicability (like with Newton) after which there have to be modifications due to currently unknown physics in GR's case (as in Newtons case where a new physical regime takes over - gravity 'inside' the mass). An aside is that one should not forget that GR describes what we see as an observer NOT what is as the object being observed... eg if a particle accelerates continuously at 1g towards alpha centauri it would arrive there "before" a light beam would... yet we have never exceeded the speed of light to the observer at take off. So we could theoretically get to alpha centauri faster than light... The particle would find it arrives there after only months... yet never "BE OBSERVED" going faster than light... The paradox of light speed or time would not apply to either the observer nor the particle. So the problem is NOT that Einstein's GR is wrong - it's that we have no data - and so we only have a myriad of mathematical extensions which, though 'logical', lead to apparently crazy speculations - they explain nothing physically/in reality, until we have more data ;) I personally might suspect the black hole is just a region of pure energy supporting the event horizon, with no singularity and with Gravity dropping to Zero in the centre - but I have no data.

Finally a scientist that understands the role of science... well, mostly. Better than most.

Wow. Science edition of Between Two Ferns!

11:00 my gosh, he decided to grasp that ascientific nettle. To paraphrase: q: Can language describe EvERytHhiNg to the nth degree? a: Your terms are not defined.

If I got Sabine’s take on philosophy right (hopefully…), she’s in line with an ever increasing number of scientists across most fields - according to their own accounts. Philosophy in general used to be the origin of “thinking” (severe simplification…) before the modern reduction towards all the (very useful) separate sciences. I do think any scientific specialties need some form of ‘dialectic’ back and forth between holistic philosophy and the specifics of actual science. Inspiration, intuition, time or creativity have their values as counterweights to pure empirical findings. Not for the “answers” themselves, but maybe for context and presence…?

Why is "I don't know" such a difficult thing to say, even for philosophers? Sabine is really taking the words out of my mouth. "I don't know" "I don't know if we'll ever be able to know", so some questions will be forever unanswered; or will they.

She is a true prophet. Only a whole and gifted person could have the humility to wear those shoes !

They could have provided more comfortable chairs.

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Love Sabine and how practical she is. I don't know if you know but the multiverse people are a bit arrogant in how they talk down to those who disagree.

Sabine is one smart cookie.

I just love this down-to-earth woman)

Sabine is very honest with her ignorance about the nature of reality. Though she said that she is not a realist in the usual meaning of the term, she believes that with theory, but not probably with mathematics, we can approach or uncover reality. On the other hand, Lawson does not seem to think the same.

For a second I thought I clicked on 'Between Two Ferns' (Zack Galaf...etc) Lol.

Sabine is a star.

The conversation got much better towards the end. I was worried when they started talking about the importance of philosophy (which I love), as I worry that it cannibalizes physics talent as mentioned by the host, but then with the help of Lawson as he pressed on got some good responses from Sabine! I was reminded why I enjoy her content - I've always felt that theories that involve assumptions about "other worlds" are very interesting, but if these worlds can "never" be reached then maybe our greatest minds shouldn't be wasting their time on such theories. Only thing I disagree with Sabine on is that she thinks science should just be about understanding things, which may be true in principle, but that is not very inspirational.

Dr Hosdenfelder always has something to say which allows me to consider a different possibility for integration into my personal world view.

Great interview the questions intrigued me more than the answers

"Physics at the limits of reality"... Plural... so many limits... What a bombastic catch! Physics is at the limit of its models. As if there is some Physics beyond reality. Why not being simple? We need a fresh model(s). It happens all the time. This is the bread and butter of the Physicists: new models.

the philosophical is the output of the information we get from the world, mathematical figure out the information, work to improve and decipher. Believes are the conclusions, algorithms we have, that makes a pattern in our behavior, when we think (philosophically), and thoughts shapes the reality. philosophy -> mathematical thinking -> believes patterns and behavior -> philosophy... beyond that, the thought content is in the void. Void which is the space. As much awareness (attention) we have without distractions in the present, the consciousness rise up and you start to sense other dimensions. We have to see the world (objective) and the inner space awareness (subjective) as a one whole like a neuronal system that interact each other sharing information in both directions objective and subjective at the same time. That shapes the perceptions of reality.

I summarised the problems with the mathematics underpinning the Big Bang in ‘Refuting Relativity’.

With science the question of why has to be limited to the horizon of testability

Sabine H?? HERE FOR THE SPICY SCIENCE

“Physicists haven’t payed enough attention to philosophy, and now they are stuck”. More or less quoting Sabine, around 3 minutes into this video. My questions: which parts of philosophy are meant, which fundamental thoughts? Like, do Kant or Schopenhauer come close? And in which way would that philosophy, those thoughts have prevented those physicists from getting stuck? Maybe an idea: could Sabine spend a video on her channel on this topic? It really would be insightful and interesting, hopefully within a ten minute time frame.

We love the knowing of we we found out and what may never be found out. I don't know.

The CTMU shows the true relationship between science and philosophy.

I love Sabine. She is down to earth and patient. I find Hilary rather frustrating in the way he tries to put far fetched ideas of his own in to her mouth. You can tell he has read a lot of books but his style is not really that of being investigative it is rather to show of he has read a lot of books. Thomas Kuhn's(The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) perspectives written in the 1960's very much outlines the way Sabine is thinking, and if Hilary had read it and understood it this interview would have been so much better.

The great Gauss said about philosophy , “when a philosopher says something correct , it is usually trivial , and when he says something non trivial , it’s usually wrong. “

Trying to decipher intelligence and not recognizing that intelligence as being intelligent is a crime . Go Sabine ! :O)

❤

So... Since all our measuring apparatus is based on electromagnetic interactions, all particles except the electron have in fact never been observed... only inferred. Do they fall outside of science as well?

One thing should be evident: There is an objective reality but we will never be able to have a full knowledge about everything. We can only get closer and closer to it.

11:05 -- SHE'S RIGHT. I'm sick of the whole "unreasonable effectiveness" argument in favor of math somehow being the blueprint for reality. I can imagine the ancient Greeks arguing in favor of epicycles by using the same argument -- but its math is so unreasonably effective that it must be true, which is exactly what today's physicists say about their latest crop of super-symmetric stringy whatnots. Math is just as unreasonably effective at describing bunk as useful stuff!

Why science works? you observe, generate a model, test your model and if the experiment is succesful it's a valid model with certain criteria. Of course later some observation compromises the model but that's to be expected, it's a model, not the real thing, whe're always generating more accurate and compatible models but they are still abstractions of reality, i don't understand the question, why woldn't it work?

18:50 The asymmetry of time actually implies the accumulation of time, more precisely, history, variety. Instead of the Copenhagen and/or multi-world interpretations of quantum mechanics, the presence of spontaneous Lorentz transformations seems to be more physical. The observer can choose the observable Universe as his own frame of reference, and then the redshift of spectral lines in the global/own frame of reference is characterized by the value: z= [w-w(0)]/w(0)=Hl/c, where l is the characteristic size of the frame of reference, and in this case l=l(universe). Then, for the reference frame, where for the light signal ds^2=0, the invariance of the speed of light c=cdl/dx(0) follows with respect to spontaneous Lorentz transformations. That is, the world itself already has many-sided (~ "multi-world") and improvisational (~"probabilistic") properties. P.S. The inscription on the ancient Roman clock: “More than you think”.

13:14 mathematics is a mirror we have polished to reflect reality.

The name of David Bentley Hart comes to mind here, as a man who speaks very intelligently about religion as opposed to materialism.

❤❤❤

I often hear people say that philosophy asks the underlying questions. But I am coming to consider that a trick of history rather than something logically sound

16:19 I think a better name would inspire better understanding. I propose Waveform mechanics, the compressible currents within a defined space. I think that name is much more on point.