“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”—Upton Sinclair
“Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can’t explain what was not observed.”—Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine Hossenfelder is a former scientist and now a well-known blogger and YouTuber. Her blog, Backreaction started in 2006 (about a year after mine) and continues today alongside her videos.
Over the years Hossenfelder has built a reputation for well-informed, honest commentary on modern physics (with occasional forays into light entertainment). She is an inveterate fact-checker and debunker of fallacies. Hossenfelder is very direct and forthright in her opinions.
In my opinion, her views on topics outside of her area expertise are no better than average. However, her physics explanations are usually quite good. She has accumulated 1.68 million subscribers (including yours truly) which is good for a channel that mainly offers hardcore science content.
Her blogs and videos cover a wide range of topics. Hossenfelder often takes and defends a stance on issues. Notably, she rejects aesthetics ("elegance", "beauty", etc) as a criteria for judging scientific theories. She also defends instrumentalism in quantum physics ("shut up and calculate"). And she is "against free will" (though I'm not sure which kind of "free will" she means). In this sense, Hossenfelder is very much an orthodox scientist who thinks quantum physics, as it stands, is the best we can do.
Hossenfelder's critical commentaries reliably inform, educate, and entertain. However, in the in the last year the content of the Hossenfelder's channel has begun to change in tone. Hossenfelder has always been critical of reported science, but she is increasingly critical of the science establishment.
On 5 April 2024, she posted a confessional monologue, emotively titled: My dream died, and now I'm here in which she described her harrowing experiences of academia and her realisation that the goal of the most of the research was merely to attract more funding. Derek Muller, the host of another hardcore science channel: Veritasium (~18 million followers) commented in response:
After finishing my PhD I went to a university-led session on ‘What Comes Next.’ What I heard sounded a lot like “now, you beg for money.” It was so depressing to think about all the very clever people in that room who had worked so very hard only to find out they had no financial security and would be spending most of their days asking for money. I realized that even what I thought of as the ‘safe path’ was uncertain so I may as well go after what I truly want. That led me here.
So, yes, academic science is dominated by the scrabble for funding, which means scientists often don't have job security but go from grant to grant, always uncertain. Based on conversations I've had with academics, Hossenfelder's comments on short-term contracts and the funding game also ring true.
But of course, Muller didn't have to also contend with sexism. I've heard very similar complaints about sexism in academia from women in Buddhist Studies, so I am inclined to believe Hossenfelder when she claims to have suffered from sexism. It seems to be very common for women in academia. In this case, the other comments on Hossenfelder's videos are worth looking at. A number of her correspondents are women who report having had similar experiences in academic science departments.
As such, I'm inclined to give Hossenfelder the benefit of the doubt. Let's look more at the substance of her criticisms.
Hossenfelder's Crisis
In 2017 Hossenfelder published a letter in Nature Physics, one of the premier scientific journals:
Hossenfelder, Sabine (2017). "Science needs reason to be trusted." Nature Physics 13: 316–317
It came with the strapline:
That we now live in the grip of post-factualism would seem naturally repellent to most physicists. But in championing theory without demanding empirical evidence, we're guilty of ignoring the facts ourselves.
This is quite emotive language, right out of the block. The article is paywalled by Nature, but it can be read online here. The kind of problem that Hossenfelder wanted to draw attention to is:
In December 2015, the LHC collaborations CMS and ATLAS presented evidence for a deviation from standard-model physics at approximately 750 GeV resonant mass. The excess appeared in the two-photon decay channel and had a low statistical significance. It didn't look like anything anybody had ever predicted. By August 2016, new data had revealed that the excess was merely a statistical fluctuation. But before this happened, high-energy physicists produced more than 600 papers to explain the supposed signal. Many of these papers were published in the field's top journals. None of them describes reality.
Hossenfelder notes that this practice of of churning out speculative papers on hot topics is so common that physicists refer to it as "ambulance chasing". 600 papers on one experimental result that turned out to be a glitch. No one can possibly read all of them, and it would have been completely unprofitable to do so because, as Hossenfelder notes, none of them describes reality.
Hossenfelder (2017) argues that the problem is ubiquitous across physics and notes:
What worries me is that this flood of papers is a stunning demonstration for how useless the current quality criteria are. If it takes but a few months to produce several hundred 'explanations' for a statistical fluke, then what are these explanations good for?
This information overload inevitably leads to filtering. One doesn't attempt to read everything, one chooses which papers to read. But how? I suspect that they read papers in journals they trust, authored by scientists they recognise and they don't read papers by unknowns. It's not what you know, it's who you know. So social issues are deeply affecting science. Hossenfelder's plea is that physicists pay attention to social sources of bias. For example:
Thousands of papers have been written about [the blackhole information paradox] during my lifetime, and hundreds of solutions have been proposed, but theorists just can’t agree on one. The reason is that they don’t have to: For the black holes which we observe (eg at the center of our galaxy), the temperature of the Hawking radiation is so tiny there’s no chance of measuring any of the emitted particles. And so, black hole evaporation is the perfect playground for mathematical speculation. Backreaction (6 April 2017).
This example gives a sense of what Hossenfelder meant when she wrote about "championing theory without demanding empirical evidence". One might also describe it as fishing for new physics in the absence of any new observations. Science needs to be driven by observation rather than speculation. This was more or less the whole point of the European Enlightenment.
On 11 Feb 2023, Hossenfelder posted a video entitled "What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science.)" which sets out to indict (her erstwhile) field of particle physics claiming that the standard model was complete in the 1970s and no progress has been made since.
The argument goes that, as far as we know, the standard model explains all known observations and does not require any new phenomena (i.e. particles) to account for observations. We don't need a new model of particle physics.
What we have seen is a stream of arbitrary new "models" (computer simulations) which fit the existing data but also make predictions about new particles such as axions, wimps, and dark matter. Hossenfelder points out that all of these predictions have failed basic tests. And science has failed to make much progress because the best minds are wasting their time on toy models rather than investigating nature.
One of the best examples of this is string theory with its many extra unobservable dimensions. String theory soaked up vast amounts of funding but in the end it tells us nothing about the physics of world we live in, though arguably it does tell us something about the sociology of science.
One problem which seems to drive the quest for new particles is that the standard model of particle physics cannot be reconciled with the standard model of cosmology. But there's no principial reason that these theories should be reconcilable. The quest for "unification" is based on beliefs and aesthetics, not evidence. Moreover, the two relevant theories behind the models—quantum field theory and general relativity—are both incomplete on their own. For example, relativity predicts singularities that we know, from other observations, cannot exist. Worse, David Wiltshire has raised some serious doubts about the current cosmological models. Wiltshire persuasively argues that "dark energy" is an artefact of an incorrect assumption about the homogeneity of the universe.
There is some idea that reconciling these two theories requires a quantum theory of gravity. However, there is no reason to believe that gravity is quantised, since there is no known mechanism by which it could be quantised. To the best of my knowledge, in our universe the only mechanism that is known to quantize energy is a standing wave. It is the electron qua standing wave in an atom that accounts for the quantization of electrons and photons.
The 5 April 2024, video My dream died, and now I'm here introduces us to Hossenfelder's backstory, but I'm not sure it helps her case. By introducing her personal story, Hossenfelder reveals a motive for being critical that is personal rather than scientific. The fact that sexist and dogmatic scientists killed her dreams is not irrelevant to her stance as a critic and I think some people (not me) will simply assume that her complaints are sour grapes.
The culmination of Hossenfelder's criticism, to date, is a video titled I was asked to keep this confidential, posted on 15 Feb 2025. In the video, Hossenfelder reads out an email that she says was sent to her, in confidence, after her letter appeared in Nature Physics. The email, ostensibly from a former colleague, expresses concerns about the potential impact on the jobs and careers of scientists of exposing the real nature of science to funding bodies.
The obvious problem with the confidential email is that we have no way of discerning the authenticity of the email. We cannot observe it. If anything, it sounds like a caricature of exactly the kind of practices and attitudes that Hossenfelder is critical of. Which seems a little too convenient. I'm not saying I don't believe her, I'm saying that secret sources and anonymous informants don't contribute to a concrete case. And they give the trolls an easy way to dismiss her. I know it is personal, but I also know that whenever I let my personal feelings show, academics look down their noses at me. It's counterproductive.
Is There a Crisis in Physics?
To be clear, everyone acknowledges that the two best theories of physics—general relativity and quantum physics—are incomplete as they stand. They have been incomplete for a century or more. The fact that these theories remain incomplete has to be seen as a failure. I believe I know why quantum physics has failed, though as an outsider, I doubt anyone is interested in my opinion. But in any case, whether this failure represents a "crisis" is moot.
The sexist treatment of women in science is an egregious a failure as well. The evidence is that women are entirely capable of doing science at the highest levels. Patriarchy has no place in science, and yet... patriarchy continues to play a role. Come on, men, you know sexism is bullshit!
We might argue over whether this or that problem constitutes a "crisis", but given Hossenfelder's observations, I would have thought that no one could argue that science is "going well". I'm definitely wrong about this.
Hossenfelder is not the only one who talks in terms of a "crisis in physics". Sean Carroll (31 July 2023), has used these very words for example. But in his case, the headline is clickbait because in his preamble he says
In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. (Emphasis added)
Indeed, despite being highly critical of attitudes to the foundations of quantum physics, Carroll apparently believes that physics is a victim of its own success. Hmm. This attitude is hardly credible and looks like good old fashioned denial.
Eric Weinstein (who has a PhD in maths, but has mainly worked in the finance sector) is another trenchant critic of modern physics. This interview seems to be representative of his views: What If the Smartest People Are Lying to You? - Eric Weinstein.
The counterargument with Weinstein is that he has a pet "theory of everything" that scientists have dismissed. When you listen to him talk, there is very obviously sour grapes over this. Hossenfelder at least maintains the impression of being mainly concerned about science. Weinstein is openly annoyed that scientists won't take him seriously and seems to believe that this is personal rather than professional.
As I know from personal experience, it's difficult for an outsider to break into any field that requires expertise, even when outsiders are experts. Nothing I do will change the fact that I'm an outsider. I don't have a PhD or institutional credentials; I don't play the game the way it is supposed to be played. It's not that scholars disagree with me, it's that they ignore outsiders as a matter of course. Given that 80% of humanities articles are never published, it seems that they mostly ignore each other as well. So I feel for Weinstein, but having listened to his pitch, I don't find him credible and was not motivated to look up his theory (I'm more interested in another outsider, John Macken).
I do believe that Weinstein has met "trolls with PhDs". I've met them too. My sense is that people who are smart but not creative (don't have original ideas) become gatekeepers and station-keepers. They know they can never tackle any of the big problems, that they will never win a Nobel, but they want to stay in the game. So they appoint themselves as keepers of "standards" which is what they have instead of ideas. And thus the religion of scientism was born.
Where I sympathise with Weinstein and Hossenfelder, is that physicists do seem to be caught up in ambulance chasing, gaming the system, and other unprofitable activities because, they believe that this what is required of them. Dissenters and outsiders are treated poorly, especially in the face of massive information overload. The insiders feel no compunction to be polite to outsiders who they regularly describe as "crackpots" (whether we are or not). And yet, the main theories of physics are still incomplete.
From where I sit, physicists do seem to be more interested in continuing to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed than they are in explaining the world.
Note added 14 May 2025. See also the essay just published in Nature by Carlo Rovelli (2025), which expresses similar criticisms, though framed rather differently.
"But an epochal sequence of experimental results has proved many such speculations unfounded, and confirmed physics that I learnt at school half a century ago. I think physicists are failing to heed the lessons — and that, in turn, is hindering progress in physics... My hunch is that it is at least partly because physicists are bad philosophers."
I certainly agree with the last proposition. Moreover, as Mary Midgley said in 1979 (with reference to "the selfish gene": "There is now no safer occupation than talking bad science to philosophers, except talking bad philosophy to scientists."
As Hossenfelder highlights when reading out the "confidential email", there is a lot at stake in this spat: tens of thousands of physicist's jobs, and the identities and social standing of physicists.
There is clearly a sense of entitlement amongst physicists who think we should spend £billions on, say, a new super-collider despite having no reason to believe it will find anything new. Because, to them, physics is intrinsically important. Physics tells us how the world works. Except, of course, quantum physics (Hossenfelder's field) has largely abandoned any attempt to explain the world, replacing it with aimlessly twiddling the sliders on virtual models in the hope that something of value might turn up.
It might be interesting to consider how physics got into this mess. Which is all about politics.
Physics and the Military Industrial Complex.
Adam Becker (2018: 79-83) notes that after the war and the "success" of the atomic bomb program, and with the Cold War just beginning, money flooded into physics. A good deal of that money came from the US military.
In 1938 the total spend on physics research was ~$17 million per annum. Almost none of which came from the public purse. By 1953 the total funding was $400 million p/a. Similarly, in 1941, 170 students were awarded PhDs in physics. By 1951 that figure was over 500 and rising.
Moreover, by 1954, 98% of the funding for "basic research in the physical sciences" was coming from public funds. This is a dramatic change. Under the current political-economic regime, when you use public funds, there has to be some kind of public accountability.
With the ascendency of physics and the glut of funding came a sense of entitlement. Becker (2018: 80-81) cites Samuel Goudsmit:
It's been a shock. We've got marvellous laboratories for basic research, which is the real love of any self-respecting physicist, but somehow we don't have the same tender affection for them that we would have had years ago, when acquiring a three-hundred-dollar spectroscope was reason enough to throw a party. Today we're given a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment, and the minute the dedication ceremonies are over, we're poring over the plans for an even more powerful one.
With the flood of money and new graduates into physics, obtaining funding rapidly became a game. The aim of the game is to secure funding while promising as little as possible and providing little or no return on investment. While the Cold War arms race helped to push things along, the situation became considerably worse with the advent of target culture in the 1980s.
In the 1980s, science, along with everything else in life, became a matter of setting arbitrary targets and defining "success" as having met those targets (target culture). Whether or not meeting those targets represented any kind of contribution (often it does not). For example, quantity of publications became a common measure of "success" ("publish or perish"). And this led to an explosion in scholarly publication, but not to an explosion in knowledge. Roughly the same amount of knowledge is now swamped by a vast amount of noise.
There are clearly some real problems in science in 2025. However, scientists are not responsible for the competitive funding models. That is actually the fault of the funding bodies themselves. The neoliberal zeitgeist emphasises individualism, competition, utilitarianism, and commerce. Making scientists compete for short-term funding was their idea of driving improvement in science, because they have an ideological belief in the value of competition and of keeping their clients hungry.
The fact that science is a collective, collaborative, and cooperative knowledge-seeking activity seems not to have registered with neoliberals. That sounds like socialism. Better to divide and conquer!
And this is not restricted to science. We live in an era of the commodification and monetization of everything, including the commodification of the self. Commodification and monetization is almost always followed by enshittification.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Cory Doctorow (2023).
This clearly affects all social media, for example, and things like Google Maps, and this blogging platform which was considerably better when it launched than it is now (every "upgrade" breaks something that was important to me).
Science was commodified after the atom bomb. Scientists became merely workers. This process was already well underway when Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848:
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into it's paid wage-labourers. (1992: 5)
This should not be read as an endorsement of Marx and Engels generally. I'm not advocating for Marxism per se. I'm just pointing out that it was obvious in 1848 that social changes in capitalism tend to downgrade the the status of petite bourgeoisie.
Multinationals and governments became the patrons of science with the expectation that they could exploit the products that scientists produced. And physics in particular seemed to promise more weapons of mass destruction like the atom bomb (and duly produced the H bomb and neutron bomb). Those "glory" days seem to be over.
On the other hand, no one living in Cambridge can fail to notice that Cambridge University is constantly spinning off science-driven business ventures like a rat shedding fleas. Vast amounts of time and resources are still being spent to commodify and monetize science. In Cambridge, at least two former shopping centres are being converted into science labs funded by venture capitalists.
Changing Tack
What I hear in Hossenfelder's recent videos is a distinct change in her critique. She is no longer complaining that the unhelpful attitudes or fraud scandals are "killing science". Rather, she emphasises that the science funding model is economically incoherent.
Hossenfelder appears to have concluded that scientists are not listening to her and that they won't ever listen. In adopting the language of return on investment, she appears to be addressing her remarks to funding bodies, i.e. governments, militaries, and multinationals, i.e. to the military-industrial complex itself.
If the military-industrial complex are listening then they might be annoyed to think that their investment has been largely wasted in recent decades because scientists are gaming the system. They might feel that the whole exercise has been a scam (though to be fair, funding bodies made the funding of science a competitive game).
If the military-industrial complex were to take Hossenfelder's critique to heart, they might want to drastically rethink how science is funded and how quality is assessed. They might want to reassess the return on investment of multi-billion dollar projects that don't produce any income or useful products.
Looking at the push-back on social media, I don't think physicists have even noticed the change in language. The trolls-with-PhDs are still vocal defenders of the system of taking public money and getting no results: the sense of entitlement is palpable. They seem to believe that this is how science works and that they are entitled to public funds without public accountability.
And a lot of what Hossenfelder complains about are the results of this process in which neoliberalism revolutionised our lives in detrimental ways. For this reason, I'm not delighted to see Hossenfelder adopting the language of neoliberalism. I get it, since the chances of funding bodies listening is higher if she speaks their language. On the other hand, have scientists remained wilfully blind to the problems within their own field. Hubris, meet Nemesis.
I did see several people on social media responding to Hossenfelder by whining that "politics should be kept out of physics". My response to this is simple. When scientists began to take vast sums of public money, they also signed up for public accountability. There is no entitlement to funding.
Conclusion
I find Sabine Hossenfelder an intriguing figure. On one hand, based on her letter to Nature, Hossenfelder might be seen as a dissenter and critic. On the other hand, Hossenfelder is also a conservative defender of scientific orthodoxy. As far as I can tell, she's not someone who has contributed much in the way of new ideas or even new ways of seeing old ideas. But she clearly understands complex concepts and mathematics very well, and she is an effective science communicator with a popular YouTube channel. An influencer.
I think Hossenfelder is sincere and my limited experience of academia is consistent with her complaints. Patriarchy is, sadly, alive and well in academia. There is also no doubt that the neoliberal revolution has, long since, thoroughly penetrated to the heart of our universities in the form of treating the education of our children as a business opportunity. This is accompanied by target culture, short-termism, over-emphasis of competition, insensitivity to social inequality, utilitarianism, treating commerce as the highest form of human culture, and all the other faults of liberalism. All the things that are fucking up the world right now. The process of commodification, monetization, and enshitification is just a specific instance of how this plays out.
I think there is a crisis in physics. The most important physics theories remain incomplete and the efforts to complete them have been spectacular and costly failures. Moreover, gaming the system has become a raison d'être for academics. And computer models make it all too easy to practice "ambulance chasing" and flood the literature with noise. Although, to be fair, this funding model was imposed on science rather than being a choice that scientists made. Focussing on insoluble problems like the blackhole information paradox helps to perpetuate this dynamic (and, anyway, Noether's theorem gives us no reason to believe that "information" should be a conserved quantity since there is no associated symmetry).
But is it a "conspiracy"? It's clear that the commodification and gamification of everything is part of the capitalist agenda. And capitalism is a conspiracy amongst those who have excess capital to ensure that they and their children can continue hoard resources and have power over other people.
Most scientists have no new ideas to speak of and make no lasting contribution. They are happy to shut up and calculate, because calculating is difficult and they are good at it; so it is rewarding. The fact of not making any contribution to science is no longer a concern, since attracting funding is now seen as a science activity in its own right.
Is physics a scam? Not really, or at least not entirely. I think the physics community is scamming the funding bodies (and deluding themselves). But physics per se is still a very useful paradigm for thinking about the world and I genuinely appreciate all those science communicators trying hard to make science accessible to people like me. I'm currently revising all the mathematics I've forgotten in the last +40 years, with a view to doing some online physics courses. I love science. I hope the ideas in these essays might find an audience, though I'm likely to remain firmly in the "crackpot" category as far as the gatekeepers are concerned.
If funding bodies take notice of Hossenfelder, then science funding is likely to be redistributed and physicists are likely to face mass redundancies. Given the reach of her YouTube channel and the fact that she is now talking the language of return on investment, I think it highly likely that funding bodies are going to notice.
Also we cannot ignore that the tide is turning in the world. Fascism is ascendent once more. It's one way to ensure a compliant workforce for the capitalism without forcibly enslaving everyone. And fascism seems to be blind to systemic/existential problems like climate change, pollution, overpopulation, and ecosystem collapse. Fascism is also anti-intellectual, since intellectuals are the first line of defence against fascism. As we transition from neoliberalism to fascism, there are going to be casualties. And this will be true in science as much as any other walk of life.
~~Φ~~
Becker, Adam. (2018). What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. John Murray.
Doctorow, Cory (2023). "The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok Or how, exactly, platforms die.". Wired. 23 Jan 2023. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Marx, K and Engels, F. (1992). The Communist Manifesto [1848]. Oxford University Press.
Midgley, Mary. (1979). "Gene-juggling." Philosophy. 54(210): 439-458.
A selection of Hossenfelder's critical videos in reverse chronological order.
- 15 Feb 2025: I was asked to keep this confidential.
- 16 Nov 2024: Science is in trouble and it worries me.
- 4 Nov 2024: The crisis in physics is real: Science is failing. .
- 9 Oct 2024: These new scientific fraud cases worry me: Now also in material science.
- 5 Oct 2024: This is why physics is dying.
- 9 May 2024: Scientific Progress is Slowing Down. But Why?
- 5 April 2024: My dream died, and now I'm here.
- 1 Mar 2024: Astrophysicists keep finding things that “shouldn’t exist”. I think I know why.
- 18 Feb 2024: Alarming: Fraud spreads in Science -- and I fear it will become worse.
- 10 Feb 2024: Prominent Physicist Misleads Public about Prospects of Expensive Particle Collider.
- 5 Aug 2023: Do we have evidence for new physics?
- 11 Feb 2023: What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science).
- 5 No 2022: The Quantum Hype Bubble Is About To Burst.
