Sabine Hossenfelder | ||||||||||
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Born | ||||||||||
Nationality | German | |||||||||
Alma mater | ||||||||||
Known for | Analog models of gravity | |||||||||
Spouse | Stefan Scherer | |||||||||
Scientific career | ||||||||||
Fields | Quantum gravity | |||||||||
Institutions | ||||||||||
Thesis | Schwarze Löcher in Extra-Dimensionen : Eigenschaften und Nachweis (2003) | |||||||||
Doctoral advisor | Horst Stöcker | |||||||||
YouTube information | ||||||||||
Channel | ||||||||||
Years active | 2007–present | |||||||||
Genre | Science communication | |||||||||
Subscribers | 1.53 million [1] | |||||||||
Total views | 219 million [1] | |||||||||
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Last updated: 5 November 2024 | ||||||||||
Website | sabinehossenfelder |
Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder (born 18 September 1976) is a German theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, author, science communicator, and YouTuber. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology, and of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions .
Sabine Hossenfelder was born in Frankfurt, West Germany, on 18 September 1976. [2] [3] She received an undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1997 from the Goethe University Frankfurt. [4] In 2004, she completed a doctorate in theoretical physics from the same institution, with her thesis titled "Schwarze Löcher in Extra-Dimensionen: Eigenschaften und Nachweis" (lit. 'Black Holes in Extra Dimensions: Properties and Detection'). [2] That same year, she published an English research paper with a similar title, "Black Hole Relics in Large Extra Dimensions", in Physics Letters B . [5]
Hossenfelder remained in Germany until 2004 on a postdoctoral research position from the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt. [4] She was subsequently employed as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Arizona, Tucson, University of California, Santa Barbara, and later at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. In 2009, she became an assistant professor at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden. [6] Between 2015 and 2023, she was employed at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies,[ citation needed ] followed by a post at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich's Center for Mathematical Philosophy. [7] [8] [9]
Hossenfelder is a popular science writer who has written books, and written a blog since 2006. [10] The blog is called Backreaction and it is run by both Hossenfelder and her husband Stefan Scherer who is also a physicist. [11] She contributed to the Forbes column "Starts with a Bang" [12] and to The Guardian [13] [14] as well as Quanta Magazine , [15] New Scientist , [16] Nature Physics , [17] Scientific American, [18] Nautilus Quarterly , [19] and Physics Today . [20] Her 2018 book, Lost in Math, was also published in German with the title Das hässliche Universum (The Ugly Universe). Hossenfelder posits that the universe (and its particle model) is messy, and that it cannot be described by a mathematically beautiful Grand Unified Theory. [21]
Hossenfelder runs an eponymous YouTube channel subtitled "Science with Sabine", [22] and in 2019-2020 published six songs on another channel named "Sabine Hossenfelder [Music Videos]". [23] In August 2022, Hossenfelder released a book titled Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions, published by Viking Press. [24] In January 2023, Hossenfelder started her association with Big Think YouTube channel. Her first video published on the channel was a lecture named "Do humans have souls?". [25] [26]
Hossenfelder married physicist Stefan Scherer in 2006. [27] [28] They have twin daughters born in December 2010. [27]
In May 2024, the International Astronomical Union named an asteroid after her, designated (16648) Hossi, after a nickname she acquired while in school. [29] [30]
Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer algebra, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Max Erik Tegmark is a Swedish-American physicist, machine learning researcher and author. He is best known for his book Life 3.0 about what the world might look like as artificial intelligence continues to improve. Tegmark is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute.
Frank Anthony Wilczek is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate. He is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Director of T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), distinguished professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and full professor at Stockholm University.
The flatness problem is a cosmological fine-tuning problem within the Big Bang model of the universe. Such problems arise from the observation that some of the initial conditions of the universe appear to be fine-tuned to very 'special' values, and that small deviations from these values would have extreme effects on the appearance of the universe at the current time.
Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densities, obtained with Guido Altarelli, known as the Altarelli–Parisi or DGLAP equations, the exact solution of the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation describing dynamic scaling of growing interfaces, and the study of whirling flocks of birds. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe for groundbreaking contributions to theory of complex systems, in particular "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales".
The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next is a 2006 book by the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin about the problems with string theory. The book strongly criticizes string theory and its prominence in contemporary theoretical physics, on the grounds that string theory has yet to come up with a single prediction that can be verified using any technology that is likely to be feasible within our lifetimes. Smolin also focuses on the difficulties faced by research in quantum gravity, and by current efforts to come up with a theory explaining all four fundamental interactions. The book is broadly concerned with the role of controversy and diversity of approaches in scientific processes and ethics.
The Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, or NORDITA, or Nordita, is an international organisation for research in theoretical physics. It was established as Nordisk Institut for Teoretisk Atomfysik in 1957 by Niels Bohr and the Swedish physicist Torsten Gustafson. Nordita was originally located at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen (Denmark), but moved to the AlbaNova University Centre in Stockholm (Sweden) on 1 January 2007. The main research areas at Nordita are astrophysics, hard and soft condensed matter physics, and high-energy physics.
Nathaniel David Mermin is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Hohenberg–Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term "boojum" to superfluidity, his textbook with Neil Ashcroft on solid-state physics, and for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information science.
In quantum mechanics, superdeterminism is a loophole in Bell's theorem. By postulating that all systems being measured are correlated with the choices of which measurements to make on them, the assumptions of the theorem are no longer fulfilled. A hidden variables theory which is superdeterministic can thus fulfill Bell's notion of local causality and still violate the inequalities derived from Bell's theorem. This makes it possible to construct a local hidden-variable theory that reproduces the predictions of quantum mechanics, for which a few toy models have been proposed. In addition to being deterministic, superdeterministic models also postulate correlations between the state that is measured and the measurement setting.
Jennifer Ouellette is an American science writer and editor.
Phenomenological quantum gravity is the research field that deals with the phenomenology of quantum gravity. The relevance of this research area derives from the fact that none of the candidate theories for quantum gravity has yielded experimentally testable predictions. Phenomenological models are designed to bridge this gap by allowing physicists to test for general properties that the hypothetical correct theory of quantum gravity has. Furthermore, due to this current lack of experiments, it is not known for sure that gravity is indeed quantum, and so evidence is required to determine whether this is the case. Phenomenological models are also necessary to assess the promise of future quantum gravity experiments.
Rainbow gravity is a theory that different wavelengths of light experience different gravity levels and are separated in the same way that a prism splits white light into the rainbow. This phenomenon would be imperceptible in areas of relatively low gravity, such as Earth, but would be significant in areas of extremely high gravity, such as a black hole. As such the theory claims to disprove that the universe has a beginning or Big Bang, as the big bang theory calls for all wavelengths of light to be impacted by gravity to the same extent. The theory was first proposed in 2003 by physicists Lee Smolin and João Magueijo, and claims to bridge the gap between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Scientists are currently attempting to detect rainbow gravity using the Large Hadron Collider.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a proposed particle accelerator with an energy significantly above that of previous circular colliders, such as the Super Proton Synchrotron, the Tevatron, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The FCC project is considering three scenarios for collision types: FCC-hh, for hadron-hadron collisions, including proton-proton and heavy ion collisions, FCC-ee, for electron-positron collisions, and FCC-eh, for electron-hadron collisions.
Ethan R. Siegel is an American theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, who studies the Big Bang theory. In the past he has been a professor at Lewis & Clark College and a blogger at Starts With a Bang, on ScienceBlogs and also on Forbes.com since 2016.
Sabine Stanley is a Canadian physicist, currently at Johns Hopkins University in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth And Planetary Sciences and the Applied Physics Laboratory. She was awarded a Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship in 2017. She was previously a Canada Research Chair of Planetary Physics at University of Toronto. She was awarded the William Gilbert Award by the AGU in 2010 and was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2011.
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an American theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist at the University of New Hampshire. She is also an advocate of increasing diversity in science.
Alessandro Strumia is an Italian physicist at the University of Pisa. His research focuses on high energy physics, beyond the Standard Model, studying the flavour of elementary particle, charge conjugation parity (CP) symmetry violations, and the Higgs boson. In September 2018, Strumia gave a controversial presentation at CERN's first Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender, where he claimed that male, not female scientists, were the victims of discrimination on the part of universities.
Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime is a non-fiction book by American theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll. The book, his fifth, was released on September 10, 2019 by Dutton.
Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions is a nonfiction popular science book by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder that was published by Viking Press on August 9, 2022. It focuses on discussing various existential and ethical questions related to scientific topics and explaining their connection to current scientific research or debunking their relevance or possibility to ever be explained by science in the first place. These questions are split into individual chapters and interviews with various scientists are included throughout the book.