Gravity can explain the collapse of the wavefunction

No co-authors but...

"I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote it myself."

Sabine Hossenfelder has been on what I'd call a 'physics crank' arc of late. Believing her one expertise can be substituted for another in fields like sociology and economics. I expect this paper to fit that mold, rather than being a return to the academy.

I'd be happy to be wrong in this case, but I'm rather skeptical. Unfortunately, I lack the qualifications to speak to the merits one way or another.

Sabine Hossenfelder these days is a YouTube personality, who likes to discuss subjects she's not an expert in. I don't know if that's the metric for "crank", but anything I hear from her is taken with a massive grain of salt.

“We know from Bell’s theorem [7, 8] that any locally causal model that correctly describes observations needs to violate measurement independence. Such theories are sometimes called ‘superdeterministic’ [9, 10]. It is therefore clear that to arrive at a local collapse model, we must use a superdeterministic approach.”

I only got the first 1/2 of my physics degree before moving on to CS, but to me this reads as “We know eternal life can only be obtained from unicorn blood, so for this paper we must use a fairytale approach.”

> Sabine Hossenfelder

She has a popular science channel https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos

I also understand she is considered controversial as she's been criticizing the scientific community, mostly on how they get funding and how they pick research direction.

From little I understood from it in this paper she is basing it off the Penrose QM-GR interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_interpretation

Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on this. To paraphrase; she says she notices a subject people are talking about but she's not an expert in, and so she accesses some recent papers on the subject, ideally including a literature review, reads them, considers everything she's read together and forms an opinion.

I ask you, what else you expect anyone else to do? Isn't this exactly a scientific process? and anything else amounts to gatekeeping.

(quick edit: I'm all for taking everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt though, even peer reviewed papers shouldn't be taken uncritically)

The description she gives of what she is doing is a stellar example of good scientific inquiry.

The problem, or at least my perception of the situation, is that she does not do what she claims to be doing. She forms uninformed opinions optimized to be engaging, interesting, and conspiratorial, instead of boring sound interpretations of what she has read.

The sad thing is that the only way for someone reading this to know whether I am gatekeeping or warning about an actual crank is to do all of this work from scratch yourself.

(I easily concede that there are plenty of problems with the institution of "Science" today -- I just think she exploits the existence of these problems to aggrandize herself instead of engage in fixing them in a productive way)

"deterministic", "superdeterministic", "measurement independence", "local", "causal" and more are well defined terms (with potentially poorly chosen names) in quantum information science and "quantum foundations". She is a crank, but a paragraph like that can be found in essays by well-respected mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists.

It often seems to me that a person's opinion on a subject is judged particularly harsh and derisively the more they are deemed an expert on some other unrelated subject. I find this a little unfair.

Fairness doesn't come into play here, this is just about predicting which of the overwhelmingly many sources of information are worth paying attention to.

Feel free to come up with your own predictive model of whether someone is worth listening to. It's hard to compare such models fairly, but if you feel yours is better, it might be worth sharing.

Maybe I wasn’t being clear enough. I know that all those terms have definitions. But in my opinion superdeterminism is not really falsifiable, and in fact very much more problematic than nonlocality as it actually appears in QM contexts.

In the most plain terms, the author is claiming that the collapse of the wave function can be explained deterministically if you just accept that it was preordained.

Its the curse of engagement. If she read the literature and came to a "boring" opinion it would be much harder to gain a following online. It isn't impossible to gain a following without getting conspiratorial, but it is much harder.

I wonder if she's published anything more down to earth lately. That's usually a good filter for cranks.