Maybe I’m crazy
How often can you hold up four fingers, hear a thousand people shout “five”, and not agree with them? How often can you repeat an argument, see it ignored, and still believe in reason? How often can you tell a thousand scientists the blatantly obvious, hear...

A philosopher's take on “naturalness” in particle physics
Square watermelons. Natural? [ Image Source ] Porter Williams is a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. He has a new paper about “naturalness,” an idea that has become a prominent doctrine in particle physics. In brief, naturalness requires that a t...

Particle physicists surprised to find I am not their cheer-leader
Me and my Particle Data Booklet. In the past week, I got a lot of messages from particle physicists who are unhappy I wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times . They inform me that they really would like to have a larger particle collider. In other news, dogs ...

Just because it’s falsifiable doesn’t mean it’s good science.
Flying carrot.  Title says it all, really, but it’s such a common misunderstanding I want to expand on this for a bit. A major reason we see so many wrong predictions in the foundations of physics – and see those make headlines – is that both scientists and...

Book Update
Yesterday, after some back-and-forth with a German customs officer, my husband finally got hold of a parcel that had gone astray. It turned out to contain 5 copies of the audio version of my book “Lost in Math.” UNABRIDGED. Read by Laura Jennings. 7 discs. ...

New Scientist creates a Crisis-Anticrisis Pair
A recent issue of New Scientist has an article about the crisis in the foundations of physics titled “ We’ll die before we find the answers. ” The article, written by Dan Cossins, is a hilarious account of a visit at Perimeter Institute. Cossins does a grea...

Particle physics may have reached the end of the line
Image: CERN CERN’s press release of plans for a larger particle collider , which I wrote about last week , made international headlines. Unfortunately, most articles about the topic just repeat the press-release, and do not explain how much the situation in...

Letter from a reader: “Someone has to write such a book” we used to say
Dear Sabine, congratulations on your book. I read it this sommer and enjoyed it
very much. For people like me,
working on solid state physics, the issues you addressed were a
recurrent subject to talk over lunch
over the last decade. “Someone has to write...

Particle physicists want money for bigger collider
Illustration of particle collision. [screen shot from this video ] The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the world’s current largest particle collider. But in a decade its days will come to an end. Particle physicists are now making plans for the futur...

Good Problems in the Foundations of Physics
img src: openclipart.org Look at the history of physics, and you will find that breakthroughs come in two different types. Either observations run into conflict with predictions and a new theory must be developed. Or physicists solve a theoretical problem, ...