Sabine Hossenfelder Gets Canceled. A Physicist Responds
Last week, we covered theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s ejection from her affiliation with the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany. She announced it on her YouTube channel on September 17, in an episode that is currently heading to 1.15 million views: I was recently contacted by a physicist who was very upset that I judge their research to be 100% [ __ ]. He demanded that I remove my video and when I politely declined, complained about me to some people he must have thought were my supervisors in a very deliberate attempt to exert pressure on me.” As we reported then, her subsequent ejection follows a surprising attack on her in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, implying that she was a proponent of “conspiracy physics.” Hossenfelder has not hesitated to call out a slough of papers in theoretical physics that she judges to be mediocre to bad, often in language characteristic of social media. But if there is an underlying conspiracy theory, it is very hard to detect. At any rate, …
