Life's Mysteries, Explained By Physics - Sabine Hossenfelder

Modern Wisdom opens with a list of questions physics has not answered: whether the past still exists, whether particles think, whether the universe was fine-tuned, whether we have free will, whether we live in a simulation. The guest, Sabine Hossenfelder, is a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies who works on quantum gravity, and her book opens with Carl Sagan's line that "it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion". She says the sentence captured her aim: the temptation is always to accept a pleasant explanation and stop looking at the evidence.

Part of the motive is autobiographical. She describes her social media work as "a little bit too destructive, a little bit depressing almost": she is the one who must answer headlines about faster-than-light information or negative mass by saying that no, it does not work. Necessary, she thinks, but one-sided — it makes physics look like a discipline that only tells you what is impossible, when its other side hands people ideas they would not otherwise have had.