Sabine Hossenfelder

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Sabine Hossenfelder (2017)

Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder (born September 18, 1976 in Frankfurt am Main ) is a German theoretical physicist who deals with gravitation and quantum gravity as well as physics beyond the standard model .

Life

After graduating from high school in 1995 at the Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium in Schwalbach am Taunus , Hossenfelder studied mathematics up to the intermediate diploma in 1997 and then physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main with the diploma "with distinction" in 2000 with Walter Greiner (Particle Production in Time Dependent Gravitational Fields) and the doctorate with Horst Stöcker 2003 (black holes in extra dimensions). As a post-doctoral student she was at GSI Darmstadt , 2004/05 at the University of Arizona , 2005/06 at the University of California, Santa Barbara and 2006 to 2009 at the Perimeter Institute . From 2010 to 2012 she took a child break. From 2009 to 2015 she was Assistant Professor at Nordita in Stockholm. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies .

Work

She researches, among other things, experimentally or observationally verifiable statements of theories of quantum gravity (such as violation of Lorentz invariance and locality ) and phenomenological models of quantum gravity. In 2018 she published an anthology about it.

In their view, free will is an illusion. It cannot be justified by any natural laws, since these are either deterministic (also in chaos theory ) with the exception of quantum mechanics, which only knows uncontrollable chance.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

In 2018 she published a book under the title Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (German title: Das ugliche Universum ), in which she criticized various undesirable developments. In her opinion, the search for the mathematical beauty of fundamental theories in physics is such a mistake. The evaluation of a theory as "ugly" from the mathematical point of view or in the sense of reductionism is largely a matter of convention, not far removed from theological convictions. Since there is often no data to prove experimentally beauty criteria such as naturalness (in the sense of harmony ), non-empirical arguments are used, which, according to Hossenfelder, can never be objective and opens the door to wishful thinking and more or less unconscious cognitive prejudices . The subject of their criticism is especially string theory (according to Hossenfelder, its representatives are cheap for universities and entertaining for colleagues) and supersymmetry , which are still mainstream in research, even after decades of unconfirmed (super partners, extra dimensions). She also criticizes attempts to explain it with phenomena that are in principle unobservable, such as multiverses . Although she has no problem with research in this area, one is only moving in a direction that at some point will no longer be called physics. In experimental high-energy physics, it marks a standstill, despite the discovery of the Higgs boson in the LHC , especially when it comes to the search for dark matter. Hossenfelder himself prefers alternative explanations such as modifications to the theory of gravity . According to her, much of the theoretical work is useless speculation: Most theoretical physicists I know are now studying things that no one has ever seen or measured. According to her, the numerous postulates of new particles are typical. In it she defines a career-enhancing scheme: Identify a known open problem that is solved naturally by introducing a new particle, whereby it is advantageous to equip it with properties that explain why they have not been discovered so far and why which will be possible in the not too distant future. By modifying the properties, this point in time can be pushed back further and further into the future. She fears that the public will lose confidence in basic research due to the many speculations that have been reported in the press without adequate data.

Furthermore, Hossenfelder criticizes the academic pressure to publish and argues that there is widespread herd behavior (swarm thinking), a tendency towards hasty publications and the desire to be cited as often as possible. The publication requirement neither allows the publisher to wait for new knowledge, nor does it enable the recipient to read individual articles in a focused manner ( information overload ). Hossenfelder is in favor of transitional scholarships that allow academics to have interdisciplinary academic mobility .

Science communication

On her YouTube channel, Hossenfelder regularly introduces basic questions of modern physics using individual questions, publishes music videos with physical and pop-cultural references and publishes interviews with other researchers, for example on the " reproducibility crisis " of scientific findings.

She also writes about natural sciences as a freelancer , also using the pseudonym Bee after her nickname in her own blog Backreaction and for the column “Starts with a Bang” of Forbes Magazine .

Fonts

  • with Dominik Schwarz, Walter Greiner : Particle production in time-dependent gravitational fields: the expanding mass shell. In: Classical and Quantum Gravity, Volume 20, 2003, pp. 2337-2354, arxiv : gr-qc / 0210110
  • Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity. In: VR Frignanni: Classical and Quantum Gravity: Theory, Analysis and Applications. 5. Nova Publishers 2011, arxiv : 1010.3420
  • What black holes can teach us. In: Focus on Black Hole Research. Nova Science Publ. 2005, arxiv : hep-ph / 0412265
  • Science needs reason to be trusted. In: Nature Physics, Volume 13, April 2017, pp. 316-317
  • S. Hossenfelder, C. Marletto, V. Verdol: Quantum gravity: Quantum effects in the gravitational field. In: Nature, Volume 549, September 2017, p. 31, doi: 10.1038 / 549031a
  • Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray , Basic Books 2018
    • German edition: The ugly universe: Why our search for beauty leads physics to a dead end. Translators Gabriele Gockel, Sonja Schuhmacher. S. Fischer 2018, ISBN 978-3-10-397246-7
  • as editor: Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity. Springer 2018

Web links

Commons : Sabine Hossenfelder  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information in your dissertation. Hossenfelder: Black Holes in Extra Dimensions: Properties and Evidence , University of Frankfurt 2003
  2. ↑ Culture: Basic physics has galloped, says physicist Sabine Hossenfelder in an interview. - Culture. In: fr.de. January 2, 2018, accessed December 7, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Curriculum Vitae on their homepage
  4. ↑ Sabine Hossenfelder: Free will is dead, let's bury it. In: /backreaction.blogspot.com. January 10, 2016, accessed February 23, 2019 .
  5. ^ Hossenfelder, The free will function , Arxiv 2012
  6. ↑ Why that, and why 25? Interview with Hossenfelder. In: Der Spiegel , No. 24, 2018, pp. 103-105.
  7. ↑ In her own words (Interview with Horgan, Scientific American 2016) she is an atheist and sees religion as a refuge for people who do not want to admit that they have no explanations.
  8. ↑ Hossenfelder, Der Spiegel, No. 24, 2018, p. 104
  9. ↑ Science on the wrong track? Theorizing under social pressure. (Lecture and panel discussion). In: YouTube. What is Real ?, June 23, 2016, accessed November 24, 2018 .
  10. ↑ uploads. In: YouTube. Sabine Hossenfelder, accessed on February 15, 2020 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Hossenfelder, Sabine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hossenfelder, Sabine Karin Doris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 18, 1976
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main