It’s stuck in the lecture format of experts talking at non-experts.
On the whole, science communication today is too one-sided. Physicists don’t appreciate this mind-opening and inspiring side of physics enough. Think about how often you see authors and screen writers borrow from physics: black holes, time slowing down, parallel universes, worm holes, teleportation. In many cases, it’s physics that lets us imagine these possibilities in the first place. But there is another side to the picture because physics also opens our minds to what is possible. It gives the impression that physics only tells us what is not possible. Though I consider my debunking really important, it’s also kind of depressing. Or a headline claiming contact to parallel universes-I’ll say no, we haven’t. For example, if there’s a headline saying that the quantum internet will allow us to send information faster than light, then I’ll be there to explain that no, it won’t. I spend a lot of time debunking science news.
Physics is more than a profession-it’s a source of inspiration. I think physicists do care and physics can’t escape existential questions. It’s likely part of the reason scientists in general (and physicists in particular) are perceived as cold and technocratic, because they seem minimally concerned with those big life questions. “Physics is so much more than what we learn in school.”īut the downside of staying away from the big questions of our existence is that it keeps us distanced from our humanity. It’s something that physicists don’t talk about often, probably for the historical reasons why scientists wanted to keep their distance from religion. Of those three, I think physics has made the biggest progress in the past century. When we try answering the big questions of existence, we generally have three options: religion, philosophy, and physics.
Physics is so much more than what we learn in school. But physics is our best tool for finding answers to the big questions of our existence, like why do we only get older and not younger, are there other universes, will we ever know everything, do we have free will, how did the universe begin, how will it end, can particles think, and so on. Listen to the audio version-read by Sabine himself-in the Next Big Idea App.Ī lot of people have a bad start with physics in school, where they get to thinking it’s just about how batteries work, planetary orbits, nuclear decay, and that kind of thing. She is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and creator of the YouTube channel Science without the Gobbledygook.īelow, Sabine shares 5 key insights from her new book, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity.
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