Existential Physics

A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

The author, Sabine Hossenfelder, is an actual physicist, and she's an excellent science popularizer as well. You can get a sampling of her output at her website and her blog. I really liked her previous book, Lost in Math, so I snapped this new one up when it became available at the Portsmouth Public Library.

Sabine's (I call her Sabine) writing style is heavily first-person and chatty, and occasionally pretty funny. (Should I add "for a German" to that? Nah, guess not.) Sample, where she mentions a debate she had about the "fine tuning" of physical constants:

I didn't look forward to the debate. I have found it futile to argue with fine-tuning believers. They just aren't interested in separating the scientific from the ascientific part of their argument. Also, I am terribly unspontaneous. If you put me on the spot, I can't find answers to the most obvious questions. Hell, I'll sometimes mispronounce my own name. Full disclosure: the major reason I agreed to this debate is that they paid for it.

That points to a (more or less) overriding theme here: Sabine is very critical of scientists wandering into ascientism, loosely defined as "religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics." E.g., when theories of the very early seconds of the universe speculate in matters that can't be observed or verified (at least for the present, and maybe not ever).

What are the "biggest questions" explored here? Fortunately, they are chapter titles: Does the past still exist? How did the Universe begin? How will it end? Is math all there is? Why doesn't anyone ever get younger? Are you just a bag of atoms? Is knowledge predictable? Do copies of us exist? Has physics ruled out free will? Is consciousness computable? Was the universe made for us? Does the universe think? Can we create a universe? Are humans predictable? What's the purpose of anything anyway?

Some of these "biggest questions" chapters also consider slightly-less-big subquestions. And there are a number of interviews with folks like David Deutsch and Roger Penrose used to explicate their views on some of the questions.

Even when I disagree with Sabine's answers (I'm a believer in free will, she's not) I have to admit she's relentlessly fair in presenting her views and possible objections to them. In a number of areas, she's happy to entertain even the most out-there speculations. (The only point where she falls down that I noticed was her discussion of whether people can be held morally responsible for their actions in the absence of free will: I found it evasive and unconvincing.)


Last Modified 2024-01-16 4:46 AM EDT