[snapcaster]

I hear this a lot from people. As a non-physicist who enjoys her content, what am I missing? is she wrong on any specific physics? Without specific criticism this comes off as insiders being upset that a fellow insider is critical of the field

[JBits]

Part of the issue for me is that I don't think her research on quantum foundations is viewed very highly. Some would probably consider it completely pointless. In her videos, she claims that the majority of physicists do not understand quantum mechanics and that AI might find patterns in the randomness of quantum mechanics. This doesn't put her tendancy to tell lay people how everyone else's research is a waste of time in a good light. She's just arguing that her research is more deserving of funding.

Plenty of her points aren't without merit but she's frequently disengenious and doesn't give the full argument for what she criticises.

An example is her criticism on "decoherence solves the measurement issue" where she explains the average of multiple particles doesn't tell you what happens to just one of the particles involved. She's not wrong in the example she gives but decoherence actually can be applied to a single particle. Compare with PBS space time, they present both sides and offer an opinion as their opinion not fact.

I recently watched a lecture on issues in particle physics. Naturalness was mentioned due to a need to ensure the theory gave sensible answers, to ensure it was renormalizable, that's far more reasonable to how Sabine presents it.

[throwaway81523]

I'm no insider but I haven't found Hossenfelder's stuff that impressive. Her reasoning tends to take the form "X is true, therefore Y", where "if X then Y" is a valid deduction, and X hasn't been proven false, so we can't say she's wrong on specific physics. But the presumption that X is true is unjustified even if X hasn't been proven false. Example: she likes superdeterminism instead of quantum mechanics with its various weird consequences. Ok, her version of superdeterminism hasn't been proven wrong, but that's a long way off from saying that it is right. It comes down to her saying "I believe X and I haven't been proven wrong, even though most other physicists believe not-X, but I like my theory better, so there". Perfectly fine and legit, but I'll take X seriously when I see more recognition for it from the rest of physics.

The same goes for this stuff about tests of string theory. As far as I can tell, string theory is perfectly good physics whether or not it is experimentally testable. That is, there is a viewpoint called "naive Popperianism" that if something isn't experimentally testable then it it isn't science, but from what I can tell, that viewpoint is not truly decisive (thus "naive"), and its proponents don't have the authority that they wish they did. As a comparable situation, there is not much dispute that general relativity (GR) is perfectly good physics except at the center of a black hole, where it predicts a singularity which people consider non-physical. Particularly, GR makes predictions about the interior of black holes (points inside the event horizon) that are considered perfectly good except at the center. But, since there is no way to observe the inside of a black hole, those predictions of GR are also not verifiable. So I'm not bothered by unverifiability. Theory is good if it has explanatory or interpretive power, not just testable predictive power.

[GoblinSlayer]

GR is ok, the problem is with researchers that use GR for work in quantum gravity, like information paradox.

[consilient]

> is she wrong on any specific physics?

She's not wrong about any of the empirical content of physics (so far as we know), but neither are the people she criticizes. It's a philosophical conflict. Most physicists are at least weakly inclined towards scientific realism, whereas Hossenfelder is a radical instrumentalist - and doesn't seem to think any other view is even worth engaging with.