Sabine Hossenfelder


Sabine Hossenfelder is a German author and theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she leads the Analog Systems for Gravity Duals group. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology.

Education

Hossenfelder completed her undergraduate degree in 1997 at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main. She remained there for a Master's degree, and she wrote a thesis under the supervision of Walter Greiner titled "Particle Production in Time Dependent Gravitational Fields", which she completed in 2000. Hossenfelder received her doctorate from the same institution in 2003, for the thesis "Black Holes in Large Extra Dimensions" under the supervision of Horst Stöcker.

Research

Hossenfelder remained in Germany until 2004 as a postdoctoral researcher at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. She moved to North America and completed research fellowships at the University of Arizona, Tucson, University of California, Santa Barbara and Perimeter Institute, Canada. She joined Nordita Institute for Theoretical Physics, Sweden, in 2009 as an Assistant Professor. In 2018 she was a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.
Hossenfelder's research interest is in the phenomenology of quantum gravity. She focuses on the role of Lorentz invariance and locality, which would be altered in the discovery of quantum gravity. Hossenfelder is trying to find experimental evidence of quantum gravity. Since 2007 she has been involved with the annual conference series "Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity". Hossenfelder has created a number of YouTube videos exploring the topic. She has been employed by the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies since 2015, where she leads the Analog Systems for Gravity Duals group. Hossenfelder has also been researching since at least 2008 on how technology is changing researchers' ability to publicize, discuss, or publish their research, when she co-organized the Science in the 21st Century workshop.

Public engagement

Hossenfelder is a freelance popular science writer who has kept a blog since 2006. She contributes to the Forbes column "Starts with a Bang" as well as Quanta Magazine, New Scientist, Nature, Scientific American, Nautilus and Physics Today. In 2016, Hossenfelder offered to act as a physics consultant on her blog—US$50 for twenty minutes of discussion—and had to recruit five extra physicists to deal with the demand. In 2017 she created cards featuring pioneering quantum physicists. Live Science and The Guardian quoted Hossenfelder as an authority when trying to evaluate the importance of Stephen Hawking's last scientific publication.
Basic Books are the publishers of Hossenfelder's first book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, released in June 2018. A review in Nature described it as "provocative", and Frank Wilczek recommended it as an "intensely personal and intellectually hard-edged" book, even though he disagreed with it "on many points". Peter Woit summarized the book's theme as follows:
Hossenfelder also is invited for talks, about "What is wrong with physics" for example.
Her 2018 book, Lost in Math, was also published in German with the title, Das Hässliche Universum. Hossenfelder posits that a universe is ugly if it can’t be described by a mathematical Great Unifying Theory that explains how particles gravitate.

Music

Hossenfelder has written and sung a number of songs which are available on YouTube.