Sabine Hossenfelder's Blog

Scientists just found a massive 7,000 kilometer-long gravitational anomaly off the coast of Africa in data from a NASA satellite. The anomaly occurred from 2006 to 2008 and has now disappeared. What caused it? Let’s have a look.

Physics has 7 base units: seconds, metres, kilograms, amperes, kelvins, moles, and candela. Of those, we technically only need the first three to calculate the latter four. But according to a new paper, we can actually calculate the first three as well – from a single constant. Let’s take a look.

Why haven’t we heard from aliens? That’s a question that sounds simple but turns into a mess the moment you try to answer it. Recently, a mathematician tried to simplify the equation by trying to calculate the odds that we’re the only intelligent life in the universe – according to his math, we shouldn’t be. Let’s take a look.

Over a century ago, Einstein wrote his theories of special relativity and general relativity. Within those theories, he predicted that, as an object moves faster, it slightly contracts in length. However, 50 years later Penrose and Terrell predicted that what one would see is instead that the object is rotated. In a recent experiment, physicists proved that this Penrose-Terrell effect is actually

I’d much rather only bring you good news, but I feel like I can’t just be quiet about this unfolding climate disaster. I no longer believe that we are able to keep the damage manageable by reducing emissions, and so all signs point to geoengineering. Remarkably enough, most climate scientists now think the same. Let’s have a look.

LLMs aren’t able to actually use logic or reasoning to reach thought-out conclusions. Despite that, several startups plan on using the current systems to do serious physics research. And some physicists, including myself, have used AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to write papers. The situation is changing incredibly fast. Let’s take a look at how LLMs might be improving at physics, and the

In which I air my frustration about how much Europe has fallen behind.

We don’t see the effects of quantum physics outside the submicroscopic scale. That’s why your lunchbox can’t be in two places at once and cats aren’t dead and alive at the same time. But why, exactly, is this true? According to physicists who’ve recently published a paper on that question, the theory of Quantum Darwinism can answer it. Let’s take a look.

You’ve probably heard that human industrialization is actually a mass extinction event that’s killed off hundreds of thousands of different animal species, I certainly did. But is that actually true? Recently, a group of ecologists published a paper comparing human-related extinctions to mass extinction events of the past. Let’s take a look at the numbers.

The Simulation Hypothesis is the idea that our universe is actually an algorithm being run on a mysterious supercomputer. In a recent paper, a group of physicists say they’ve disproved this theory by using Goedel’s theorem. Let’s take a look.