Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder

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Personal information

Sabine received a PhD in physics from the University of Frankfurt in 2003. She has since worked in many different areas in the foundations of physics, from particle physics beyond the standard model to quantum gravity, modifications of gravity, dark matter, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. In the past years, her interest has focused on the mathematical and philosophical basis of quantum mechanics.

Besides her research, Sabine has been active in science communication for about 20 years. She has written contributions for many magazines and newspapers and is producer of the popular YouTube channel “Science without the gobbledygook”. Sabine has also written two popular science books about the foundations of physics: “Lost in Math” (Basic Books, 2018) and “Existential Physics” (Viking, 2022).

Research interests

Sabine’s current research interest focuses on the role of locality and finetuning in theory development. Locality has been widely considered a lost cause in the foundations of quantum mechanics. A basically unexplored way to maintain locality, however, is the idea of superdeterminism, which has more recently also been re-considered under the name “contextuality”. Superdeterminism is widely believed to be finetuned. One of Sabine’s current research topics is to explore whether this belief is justified. The other main avenue she is pursuing is how superdeterminism can be experimentally tested.

Recent publications

1. Bell's theorem allows local theories of quantum mechanics
   Jonte R. Hance, Sabine Hossenfelder
   Nat. Phys. 18(12), 1382 (2022), arXiv:2211.01331 [quant-ph].
2. What does it take to solve the measurement problem?
   Jonte R. Hance, Sabine Hossenfelder
   J. Phys. Commun. 6 102001 (2022), arXiv:2206.10445 [quant-ph]
3. Galactic Mass-to-Light Ratios With Superfluid Dark Matter
   Tobias Mistele, Stacy McGaugh, Sabine Hossenfelder
   A&A 664, A40 (2022), arXiv:2201.07282 [astro-ph.GA]
4. A Future-Input Dependent Path Integral for Quantum Mechanics
   Sandro Donadi, Sabine Hossenfelder
   Annals of Physics 440 (2022) 168827, arXiv:2110.07168 [quant-ph]
5. Mori-Zwanzig formalism for general relativity: a new approach to the averaging problem
   Michael te Vrugt, Sabine Hossenfelder, Raphael Wittkowski
   Physical Review Letters 127, 231101 (2021), arXiv:2107.11497 [gr-qc]