Existential Physics
Sabine Hossenfelder
★★★★★ 4/5
Science
A refreshing read: A big improvement over her first book
Sabine Hossenfelder is a contrarian physicist that doesn’t shy away from calling out research that is ascientific and/or uses non scientific methods.
“I’m not exactly known for being nice”, she writes. I don’t know her, but that’s easily believable—esp. after reading her first book Lost in Math, where she rails against many current day pursuits in Foundational Physics. I wasn’t particularly captivated by that effort, as I tweeted back when that book came out, in the days before this blog.
This second book is a vast improvement and in many ways, an elaboration of the same theme: Foundational Physics researchers need to do some serious soul searching before declaring their work scientific!
Ms. Hossenfelder has made great strides as a Science author, not unlike the vast difference I noted in Amor Towles’ writing prowess between his first Rules of Civility and his second A Gentleman in Moscow. It’s inspiring to see artists/professionals sharpen their skills over time.
So What’s Different?
What’s different is the construct of the content: an attempt at answering in layperson’s terms “Life’s biggest questions”, as the book’s subtitle suggests. It is the Modern Physics viewpoint on relatable topics such as free will, the end of the universe and does quantum mechanics really explain consciousness? Ms. Hossenfelder does a fantastic job of drawing for us the limits of current scientific understanding while calling out the purely speculative, but perhaps fashionable, views in the area. This is particularly important since the popular press is accustomed to picking up and amplifying the more outlandish theories.
Ms. Hossenfelder begins the book elaborating on the distinction between a scientific theory and a non-scientific one: she uses the example of a theory that says the earth formed in place 6000 years ago with all fossil records and weathering in place. This is not necessarily ascientific. It cannot really be falsified, but offers poor explanatory power. On the other hand, several theories of the early universe and the Big Bang (e.g the Grand Unification Event), suffer from the absence of any evidence and more importantly assume the reality of something unobservable to describe what we observe—something entirely unnecessary!
For each question on various topics such as the direction of time (why don’t we grow younger?) or does the universe think, she presents in an accessible way what we know for sure and where the speculation starts. And true to her style (which I respect), she doesn’t pull any punches in decrying some of the current research—even in the more fashionable areas— that as she puts it, have more in common with religion than science.
It’s religion masquerading as science, under the guise of mathematics”
On Free Will
I enjoyed the chapter on free will, the most. In a nutshell, Ms. Hossenfelder, consistent with most physicists, rules true free will out. She argues that all current established laws of physics point to the future being fixed, except for quantum events that cannot be influenced. What I don’t fully buy is the section on Free Will and Morals. Here she categorically denies any repercussions on moral responsibility from the absence of evidence for free will. Instead she states that one can just as well make moral judgments without free will. Simply put, her view is that societal interventions are, or at least should be, based on societal value. Lock up a murderer if that truly benefits people who could be murdered! Surely that’s too simplistic a view and one that entirely ignores that most societies’ formulation of punishment is that it should be commensurate with moral culpability—not necessarily maximizing some notion of “value”? Just this week, the jury in the case of the Parkland school shooter found sufficient extenuating circumstances in the hardships the defendant faced in childhood, to vote against the death penalty for the shooter. Isn’t the absence of free will automatically an extenuating circumstance in every trial?
The subject of free will and its implications are endlessly fascinating.
Overall
More than anything, this book is refreshing, especially compared to the many popular science books that revel in the purely speculative. It is an engaging and recommended read that will help you discern the known from the unsubstantiated when it comes to the deep questions about our life and our universe.