9 thoughts on “Sabine Hossenfelder”

1. The video pretty much tells it the way it is.

   And it is also seriously “over sharing” with her YouTube audience.

   It was also a peek-behind-the-scenes that videos with this level of production values are a substantial undertaking.

   Hoping that Dr. Hossenfelder hasn’t burnt any bridges in releasing this and can continue on her career path as a popularizer of theoretical physics.

2. I didn’t find this particularly shocking. Sounds mainstream to me. The video is a little disturbing because in this one she appears to be talking through clenched teeth the whole time, which is very stress inducing to watch. It is harder for women that want to have families because of that biological clock. For men it is just easier to be a neglectful father/husband. It isn’t any different in tech either.

3. I’ve seen the exact same kind of thing play out in academia within the Earth Science community. However, there’s a bit of a difference in N. America relative to Europe. On the western side of the pond, it’s relatively easy to get into graduate school, but there’s no expectation of a job in academia after getting an MSc or PhD. Also, the DEI gods are stronger over here, so most departments have moved toward majority female status, certainly among the graduate students and approaching that in faculty. The religious zeal for climate orthodoxy is still especially strong, so you’d better not try to get funding looking for solar influences on climate. Too bad, because just a few pennies on the dollar could do a lot of good.

   1. I regard it as unfortunate that Dr. Hossenfelder included gender discrimination in science with complaints about the research direction in Physics and by extension the rest of STEM.

      Dr. Hossenfelder’s remarks about the workplace climate in Germany is in a way interesting because the European countries are held up as much more socially enlightened than the U.S. The problem with addressing her mistreatment as a woman, however, is that Higher Education in America is praising itself on how it is addressing that concern head on. Whether it is or not is open to discussion, but we are seeing many more women in high-ranking positions, many of them contributing to the other problem Dr. Hossenfelder highlighted.

      This other problem is the funding-driven herd mentality in research direction, and I get that. The powers-that-be, be they women or men in science, have, for the most part, no problem with the herd mentality.

      Don’t know how many of us on Rand’s fine Web site know about Instapundit Open Thread, but a posting of a video over there is how I learned about Pavel Kroupa’s Web site The Dark Matter Crisis. Now Dr. Kroupa in this video hints at but doesn’t quite come out that he, an ethnic German-Czech person raised in Australia and holding a faculty position in Germany is being mistreated for that, but on Dark Matter Crisis blog, he whinges about the lack of any funding to investigate alternatives to Dark Matter that 97% of astrophysicists acknowledge to be real.

      That astrophysicists are following a “herd” in pursuit of a Dark Matter theory or whether Dr. Hossenfelder is correct that theoretical physicists are headed off the String Theory cliff is the 21st century version of medieval theologians debating how many angels “can dance on the head of a pin.” But just as the theologians came up with rationalizations for rulers oppressing their serfs under Feudalism, the scientists pursuing “consensus” are offering reasons for modern day rulers to keep us peasants in our place.

      Plainly, the person who posted the link to Dr. Kroupa’s blog over at Open Thread was doing this to criticize that which cannot be criticized in “polite company”, namely the Climate Crisis, or rather, that we may be bankrupting ourselves in the prosperous countries and consigning to permanent poverty those in the countries seeking prosperity in pursuit of “Sustainability”, “Net Zero” and “Renewable” energy sources.

      Interestingly, Dr. Hossenfelder posted a “why the Climate Crisis is more serious than I had thought” followed by a retraction “why I am not that worried about the Climate Crisis.” I didn’t view those videos because I want to view here physics videos with an open mind.

      But still, the release of this video may be most unfortunate because Dr. Hossenfelder could end up losing her YouTube “gig” over it.

      1. Thanks for the pointer to Kroupa’s website. I’ve heard of MOND theories before but from this website I was able to find and print Milgrom’s original paper published in 1983 and give it a read (its only six pages). I think this paper is definitely a step in the right direction. But I think we’ve got a long way to go towards understanding Gravity esp. at the quantum level. And micro effects can have macro consequences. Onto reading about RMOND theories I guess.

4. I agree with her Gravity isn’t understood at the quantum level. In fact the smugness of Dark Matter theory reminds me of the edifice of Aether Theory trying to hold up Newtonian mechanics as the 19th century was coming to a close.

   In this century, if we’re lucky, we’ll discover Gravity and Space-time and even causality isn’t nearly as smooth and continuous as we’d like to imagine. It’ll be fascinating to understand how it all works out in the wash.

   1. Funny Paul, we both posted about the issue of Dark Matter simultaneously. A causality violation? Check your time arrowhead for nicks. lol.

5. The only way this ever gets corrected is for governments to get out of the grant and educational support business. Let schools and research labs get by on tuition and customer requests. If a government absolutely needs some type of technology developed, then they should use the prize mechanism for reaching stated, objective goals.

   So, never, probably.

   1. Those methods of funding and pushing Science literally went out in a flash and a mushroom cloud decades ago.

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