Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions by Sabine Hossenfelder

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
-PRINT: COPYRIGHT: 8/9/2022: ISBN 9781984879455; PUBLISHER: Viking; LENGTH: 272 pages [Info from Goodreads]
-DIGITAL: COPYRIGHT: 8/9/2022; PUBLISHER: Viking / Kindle Edition; LENGTH: 269 pages [Info from Goodreads]
-*AUDIO: COPYRIGHT: (8/9/2022) 9/8/2022; PUBLISHER: Penguin Audio/Audible; DURATION: 8 hours, 7 minutes (Info from Audible & Goodreads)
-FILM: No.

SERIES: No

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTION: I’ve watched a few of Sabine’s YouTube videos, and while the subject is over my head, mostly due to math issues, I find it interesting, so when I noticed that Don had a copy of this in our Audible account, I decided to play it as the one I’d listen to on my own. I need to listen to it in larger portions than he generally likes to listen to non-fiction books), but have agreed that I will listen to it again with Don. Maybe I’ll understand a bit more with repeated listening.
-ABOUT: She tries to help us make sense of physics. To a large extent, she addresses the models that scientists and theosophists have posited as (possible) truths that have no physical evidence. She describes a difference between anti-scientific and a-scientific.
-LIKED: Yes.
-DISLIKED: Nothing in particular comes to mind.
-OVERALL: This was interesting and I think the reader had a good ear for Sabine’s delivery.

AUTHOR: Sabine Hossenfelder:
(From Goodreads)
Born in GermanySeptember 18, 1976
Website http://sabinehossenfelder.com/
Twitter skdh
Genre Science, Philosophy

Sabine Hossenfelder is an author and theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she leads the Analog Systems for Gravity Duals group.

Hossenfelder completed her undergraduate degree in 1997 at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main. She remained there for a Masters degree under the supervision of Walter Greiner, entitled "Particle Production in Time Dependent Gravitational Fields", which she completed in 2000. Hossenfelder received her doctorate "Black Holes in Large Extra Dimensions" from the same institution in 2003, under the supervision of Horst Stöcker.

NARRATOR: Gina Daniels
(From gina-daniels.com)
I grew up in Philadelphia. Cheesesteaks, YAY! Scrapple, BOO! 2018 Super Bowl Champs! GO EAGLES!!!
I went to an all girls Catholic high school. 'Nuff said.
I said that I chose the University of Southern California because of their great language department (my original major was German/Russian heading toward minors in Italian and Japanese). The real reason was that during my tour of the campus I saw a building that had the name George Lucas on the side of it. Done deal.
Changed previous major. Got a BFA in Theatre.
Went to work at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival under Artistic Director Henry Woronicz and was a company
member for 5 years.
Moved to New York. Rented in Brooklyn. Bought in Queens.
Worked a lot regionally--17 states in 13 years. Missed being in New York full time, but LOVED working with theatre artists around the country...and finding and eating the best local food.
Returned to Oregon Shakes for 4 more years, this time under Artistic Director Bill Rauch.
Did a lot of great plays including All The Way, originating the roles of Coretta Scott King and Fannie Lou Hamer, which I then understudied when the play moved to Broadway. And the play won the Tony. Not too shabby.
Performed The White Snake in China. Yes, The Great Wall is pretty...well...great.
A few TV guest spots, voiceovers, and several regional gigs later (including a trip back to OSF for the world premiere of ROE), I'm home. For now.
*Gina seemed to capture the tone of Sabine’s dialogue.

GENRE: Nonfiction; Physics; Philosophy

LOCATIONS: NA

TIME FRAME NA

SUBJECTS: Physics; Science; Philosophy; Psychology; Religion

DEDICATION “To Stefan"

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From “One: Does the Past Still Exist?”
“Now and Never
Time is money. It’s also running out. Unless, possibly, it’s on your side. Time flies. Time is up. We talk about time . . . all the time. And yet time has remained one of the most difficult-to-grasp properties of nature.
It didn’t help that Albert Einstein made it personal. Before Einstein, everybody’s time passed at the same rate. Post-Einstein, we know that the passage of time depends on how much we move around. And while the numerical value we assign to each moment-say 2:14 p.m.-is a matter of convention and measurement accuracy, in pre-Einstein days, we believed that *your* now was the same as *my* now; it was a universal now, a cosmic ticking of an invisible clock that marked the present moment as special. Since Einstein, *now* is merely a convenient word that we use to describe our experience. The present moment is no longer of fundamental significance because, according to Einstein, the past and the future are as real as the present.
This doesn’t match with my experience and probably doesn’t match with yours either. But human experience is not a good guide to the fundamental laws of nature. Our perception of time is shaped by circadian rhythms and our brain’s ability to store and access memories. This ability is arguably good for many things, but to disentangle the physics of time from our perception of it, it is better to look at simple systems, like swinging pendulums, orbiting planets, or light that reaches us from distant stars. It is from observations on such simple systems that we can reliably infer the physical nature of time without getting bogged down by the often inaccurate interpretation that our senses add to physics.”

RATING: 4 Stars

STARTED-FINISHED 9/11/2023 – 9/15/2023 ( )

I enjoyed the style of this book, combining interviews with reviews and informed “opinion”. The problems the author dives into are ones i have often wondered but found hard to navigate due to the exceas of literature on the subjects, the author does a good job at pruning this.

Overall the book is a bit choppy and conceptually inconsistent without spending the time to realise and explain this. But a very good starting point for approaching existential questions from a physicist point of view.

Not for everyone, some background science familiarity is useful. ( )

Picked this up since I like her channel. Good on science, weak on philosophy about sums it up. For the most part she takes the Wittgensteinian notion that it's okay to think some questions and implications of science are not useful or worth talking about. However, any time Hossenfelder sees something as 'allowed' by the state of the science, she's instead all aboard, no matter how credulous the proposition.
It all makes for a lot of whiplash if you're looking for some stringent scientific skepticism. ( )

I am inundated with the world's voices - podcasts, YouTube videos, Instagram messages, cable TV. If we suppose that the intelligence of these commentators is normally distributed then it's likely that many of their comments are a waste of our time (this is apparent even if we don't suppose this). So, it is such a pleasure to hear what a smart person has to say.

Dr. Hossenfelder discusses various basic questions of a type usually addressed by philosophers, theologians, or your freshman-year roommate, from her viewpoint as a theoretical physicist. I won't list them here, but my only tiny complaint is that some of them are so fanciful that I didn't find them very interesting.

A good summary of SH's comments is the famous, and probably apocryphal, story that Napolean Bonaparte after reading Pierre-Simon Laplace's Celestial Mechanics commented to him that it was very nice, but there was no mention of God. Laplace replied je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse, "I had no need of that hypothesis". ( )

Ms. Hossenfelder's is an unapologetic, chip-on-her-shoulder reductionist who repeatedly asserts that nothing disproving reductionism has ever been found using the scientific method. I say big deal, science consists of provisional theories and we have no way of measuring our ignorance, which could be vast and, for all we know, near total. The author seems untroubled by the fact that science has nothing to say about value or meaning and the dimensions they add to experience.

The book gets four stars anyway, though, since it adeptly covers a lot of fascinating areas, including consciousness, multiverses, simulations, Boltzmann brains, free will, AI, and much more. ( )