Disclaimer: abstract above, content and main ideas are human-written; the full text below is written with significant help of AI but is human-verified as well as by other AIs.
"Oh, that pizza sauce recipe that calls for glue? It's totally OK, I checked it out with MechaHitler."
The trouble is that the overlap between the circles for "stuff I am excited enough to talk about" and "stuff that anybody would subscribe to a podcast for" is about the size of a rice grain.
Nope, not a clue.
Dang, maybe I should get in on that. I already own a microphone and everything.
In using xcancel to look up Eric Weinstein's bonkers rants on Xitter, I exposed myself to Sabine Hossenfelder's comment section. The drivel, the fawning, the people asking chatbots about quantum gravity... It hurts, it hurts.
I am going to scrub my brain with Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid.
Eric "I will come to Harvard and espouse Numberwang Racism if you deign to invite me" Weinstein:
Invite me back to Harvard as the co-founder of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project in the @HarvardEcon department and I will give a talk on how this really works. You don’t have to pay me a cent if you video it.
I’ll cover:
The need to fire Claudine Gay.
The need to end activist studies depts.
University Bioweapon research
String Theory
CPI Cost of Living
Evolutionary theory applied to Humans
Low Dimensional Geometry
NSF STEM Shortage Panics
DEI hiring against merit
Epstein and Science
Cognitive abilities expectations in Geographicly widely separated populations.
taking a bad paper too seriously
Hossenfelder starts her "Summary" section thusly:
I have shown here how the assumption that matter and geometry have the same fundamental origin requires the time evolution of a quantum state to differ from the Schrödinger equation.
This conclusion is unwarranted. It follows, not from the given assumption, but from the overcomplicated way that assumption is implemented and the kludges built on top of that. Here is how Hossenfelder introduces her central assumption:
What I am assuming here is then that in the to-be-found underlying theory, geometry carries the same information as the particles because they are the same. [...] Concretely, I will take this idea to imply that we have a fundamental quantum theory in which particles and their geometry are one and the same quantum state.
Taking this at face value, the quantum state of a universe containing gravitating matter is just a single ray in a Hilbert space. As cosmic time rolls on, that ray rotates. This unitary evolution of the state vector is the evolution both of the matter and of the geometry. There is, by assumption, no distinction between them. But Hossenfelder hacks one in! She says that the Hilbert space must factor into the tensor product of a Hilbert space for matter and a Hilbert space for geometry. And then she says that the only allowed states are tensor products of two copies of the same vector (up to a unitary that we could define away). If matter and geometry were truly the same, there would be no such factorization. We would not have to avoid generating entanglement between the two factors by breaking quantum mechanics, as Hossenfelder does, simply because there would not be two spaces to tango.
I am skeptical of this whole approach on multiple levels, but even granting the basic premise, it's a bad implementation of that premise. She doesn't have a model; she has a pathological "fix" to a problem of her own making.
I am still staying away from YouTube, so I am happily cut off from the bulk of her content. But when she teases a video with the phrase
People in Western countries are having fewer kids
I reserve the right to say "yikes".
Oh, and she has podcasted with sex pest Lawrence Krauss, multiple times ("What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence").
That passage of Hossenfelder's jumped out at me, too. It's a laughably bad take about the implications of Bell's theorem that ignores how just about every interpretation of quantum mechanics has responded to Bell-inequality violations, and it attempts to sanewash superdeterminism.
Also, the focus on geometry feels anachronistic; a century ago she could have proposed a geometric explanation for why nuclei stay bound together and completely overlooked gluons.
She wrote a whole book about how physicists have deluded themselves by pursuing mathematical "beauty", and now she's advocating "everything is geometry".
Sometimes they file reports against regulars, accusing them of "ableism" for being anti-slop-machine. That's also entertaining.