Sabine won't be silenced

Long time readers of this blog will recognize the name Sabine Hossenfelder.

I have referred to her and ideas she has championed with some regularity.

I am sad to report that attempts have been made to silence Dr Hossenfelder and happy to add that she has resisted them, and appears likely to continue saying what she means for some time to come.

Hossenfelder has a doctorate in theoretical physics from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her dissertation, in 2003, looked at microscopic black-hole production.

Lately, she has acquired some prominence as a nemesis of what she considers bullshit in the world of science and of physics in particular. She believes that physics as an academic field of research has guided itself into a dead end, where bullshit creation is incentivized.

Recently, for example, a distinguished scientific journal published a paper about the mathematical modeling of 'warp drive' as a way to get near and/or past the speed of light. The paper was then picked up by popular journals because what the authors were describing sounds appealingly like some popular-culture staples. Heck, one diagram included in the paper looks a bit like a blurry rendition of the familiar federation starship Enterprise.

Hossenfelder will have none of it. The paper is "meaningless," she reports. A perfect score on the bullshit meter. She says it illustrates a playfulness with mathematical models that substitutes for actual science, and shows no understanding of the physical challenges that would be involved in instantiating the model, and that render such models just so many exercises in empty fantasy world building.

Not surprisingly, there has been kickback directed toward someone so outspoken. If you've got 22 minutes, you can watch her dissect some of the kickback on YouTube.

I can't believe this really happened.

She also acknowledges that she is "no longer affiliated with the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy."

Their loss.

Keep it up Doctor. Happy New Year everyone.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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