Sabine Hossenfelder is an amazing science educator. I’ve read a couple of her books and I regularly watch her YouTube show. For all I know, she is a brilliant physicist as well as an entertaining and effective educator. Certainly, I have scientist friends who think so. And of course I have a few who are unenthusiastic about what they regard as the scientist-social media-showboat phenomenon. I have little to say about that phenomenon and less to say about whether the description is applicable to Sabine Hossenfelder. Since I see a similar thing in things apologetical and theological, I sympathize with the criticism but that’s about all I will say.
Back to Sabine Hossenfelder. In my experience, she is almost always interesting, even when she says things that seem wrong—at least wrong to me.
Case in point, in this video on the purpose of the universe and the famous quote from Nobel Prize-winning scientists Steven Weinberg, Sabine Hossenfelder is once again insightful and yet seems way off some points. The prompt for her comments is Weinberg’s famous observation, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
Hossenfelder’s commentary on Weinberg’s comment, and her effort to find a scientifically meaningful way to consider it, bring me back to what so many popular science media presentations provoke—thinking about the relationship between philosophy and science, especially metaphysics and physics. Whether there is a point or purpose to the universe seems a philosophical question, not a scientific one. Hossenfelder seems to acknowledge as much but then proceeds to consider an alternative way of talking that, in her view, science may, perhaps, invoke when it comes to the point of things such as the universe.
The issue of purposiveness or teleology or finality is philosophical, not scientific. Which brings us to the relationship to the two forms of inquiry, both involving some measure of reflection on the world and our experience of it. In ancient, medieval, and early modern times, our knowledge of the physical world did not extend vastly beyond what was available as a result of general, common experience—which is the starting point for philosophical reflection. At least not as it does today, when we have vast bodies of knowledge and immense collections of data, as a result of the special experience of modern scientific inquiry. That is, as the result of detailed and plentiful experimentation and study. It is not clear, though, how the massive amount of information and knowledge gleaned from the special experience that comes from repeated application of the scientific method, relates to the starting points of human understanding and their refinement in what we call philosophy, and in the specific branch of philosophical inquiry known as metaphysics.
There’s now so much information, often involving detailed, highly abstract mathematical models, it’s easy for some practitioners of modern physics to fall into thinking the rigors of rational philosophical analysis can be ignored or that people who are successful as theorizers in one field (physics) can freely opine in other fields (philosophy and even theology!) without grave risk of incompetence’s pitfalls.
When Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysicians well-informed about physics and cosmology encounter presentations such as Sabine Hossenfelder’s, their reactions are often similar to how physicists (such as Sabine) would react to being told that the explanation for the water falling from the sky we called rain is that angels in heaven are weeping.
This is not to say that physicists have nothing to tell philosophers about “being”, my philosopher friends tell me. It is to say that many scientifically knowledgeable philosophers are likewise used to rigorous thinking and analysis of arguments in light of experience. The results of experimentation and quantitative analysis in scientific theorizing can’t, my philosopher friends insist, entail a radical break with fundamental metaphysical insights, otherwise the power of human understanding would itself be compromised, thus undercutting physics too as a form of human inquiry.
It’s not exactly a “stay in your lane” response from the philosophers but more “understand when you’re changing lanes and be prepared to encounter better drivers therein”. At least that’s what my friends with expertise in these fields often tell me.
