YouTube video linked at end..
Looks to me as if she has finally drunk the ‘Einstein was wrong’ Kool-aid? She is usually fairly on topic if a bit abrasive and controversial. But now she seems to have gone off into hidden variable ideas which as I understand it have been well ruled out by Bell’s theorem etc.
To paraphrase Feynman: the final arbiter of truth in science is experiment. I’ll belive it when I see a well confirmed observation of FTL signalling. Link follwes:
Isn’t it pretty to show that if you can communicate faster than light, then you can send signals back in time, and then tell yourself not to send the signal, etc.?
The usual get-out for that is you’re not in the same universe. It splits when you send the signal.
Lazy writing, if you ask me.
If wormholes exist it may be possible to arrive at a distant location via the wormhole at a velocity faster than light, so long as no messages or information can pass between the two mouths of the wormhole and form a closed timelike curve.
I can’t follow Sabine’s explanation, though.
We’ve had discussions elsewhere about Hossenfelder. Opinions seemed to vary between “controversial” and “self-serving nutjob”. I seem to recall that she has a chequered academic history and holds grudges against what she regards as orthodox academia.
In any case, I managed to get through about 10 minutes of the video and she’s just all over the place. I think she might finally have lost it completely. I did agree with a good point she made, though, about our perception of time moving in only one direction, citing the example “the time you spent watching this video you will never get back”. I heartily agree! 
That is by design. Her most demonstrable talent is weaving a tangle of jargon, contorted contexts, intentional misinterpretations, manufactured exasperation, and lots of ad hominem as a substitute for any actual defensible arguments, all in the hopes that her viewers will be so enraptured by the melange that they’ll assume she must be correct and not, in fact, blowing smoke out of her ass. But, hey, it gets clicks.
In short, please do not take anything she says seriously. She does occasionally report honestly, but the ratio of “instructional content” to (borrowing @wolfpup’s scale) “nutjob” is way too miniscule to bother sifting through, and given the above-mentioned talent, it’s not really possible to do effective sifting as a layperson anyway.
Is her light cone thing right, with the preferred <something>, so that time only moves ahead? Or, is that also BS?
Future and past light cones is definitely a thing, and a fascinating way to frame the physics of light speed.
Sabine’s introduction of it into her argument, though, seems to be part of the insidious way she weaves fact with bullshit.
Apparently so. Thanks!
On the “controversial” vs. “self-serving nutjob” scale, I have considered her more SSN than C for a while, so I stopped reading her messages. Too abrasive, and fact-checking her takes too much wasted time.
I think this video is a perfect illustration of Sabine’s descent.
Because, two years ago, Sabine made a video speculating that FTL might be possible. I don’t want to rewatch it, but my recollection is that it was fairly open-minded, and I was largely on board.
Which is to say: it’s fine IMO to speculate about possible loopholes or whatever.
Now she’s gone full Avi Loeb and trying to claim that it’s our dogmatic “belief” in c as a speed limit that is preventing us zipping around the galaxy.
In other news, our dogmatic belief in electromagnetism and the exclusion principle is preventing us from walking through walls. Honestly, if I fall and hurt myself, I should sue physicists for clinging to their belief in solid matter.
I like as well, that when introducing topics that most of her audience won’t know about, like superdeterminism, she begins with several sentences of preamble asserting both that it’s correct and that the physics community is trying to prevent you hearing about it before saying what it is.
Believe it or not, there was once a time when her videos had educational merit.
I remember liking Lost in Maths, and watched several of her YouTube videos a few years ago while I was writing my unpublishable novel. This video is beyond my ability to judge, but she used to come across as grounded and skeptical, and she also published a few music videos, which I found adorable. Scientists can retain their expertise and still drift toward the fanciful (Michio Kaku comes to mind as a particular example of knowledgeable but crank-adjacent), but he’s been flirting with the Time Cube for forty years or more.
I agree with her initial assertion that we should be ready to look beyond Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for new ideas/discoveries, just as Einstein looked beyond Newtonian physics to form a more accurate picture of the Universe. I don’t know what to think about the rest of her ideas.
I think it’s intended to be entertaining content on Youtube, and looking at it that way I think it’s fine. I do like listening to her accent.
I disagree with this. Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist, and when an actual scientist uses their credentials to promulgate sensationalist bullshit to garner YouTube views, it’s a lot more insidious than some random internet crank doing the same. It rises to the level of intellectual fraud. Even worse, she’s on a mission to discredit legitimate science because she’s got a chip on her shoulder about having been unfairly treated by the academic research community.
Big ol’ “plus one” to @wolfpup’s post.
Her common shtick is that physicists the world over have bad motivations, being either (depending on what made-up point she is trying to sell at the time) (a) unwilling to challenge anything they have ever “been told”, unlike her enlightened self, or (b) lying to continue their funding. These are laughably incorrect positions. But her audience doesn’t know or care. It’s DRAMA!
As noted above, that’s by design. She’s not trying to educate with such videos. She’s trying to generate clicks through her own flavor of fear mongering.
She’s 100% correct, but late to the game, because tachyons already travel faster than light! 
Of course they do. I’ve got a few in a Penning trap right here. They don’t like it, but their charge constrains them. Now how do I apply for that Nobel?
Never mind that. How much would it cost to ship 100 over by truck?
have the technology.
You can use them for communication if you