"Magic is the engineering of coincidence"

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What I’m Reading: “Existential Physics” by Sabine Hossenfelder

I like Sabine Hossenfelder. She is a “hard” scientist, which means that any hypothesis that can’t be backed up by hard evidence is “speculation” or, the word she reserves for the very worst of fellow scientists’ flights of fancy: “ascientific”. This means things like whether the universe is made for life that hard science has nothing much to say about. I’m certain that Sabine would describe most of my book as ‘ascientific’ – but at the same time she argues – as I do – that a theory shouldn’t be ‘intuitive’, it should be explanatory.

The book takes on some big questions which you would not expect such a hard scientist to take seriously. Is the universe alive? Can it think? Quick answer, no, but we know so little about consciousness that there are versions of the universe ‘thinking’ that are compatible with physics. Sabine does a great job of treating these questions seriously. This is an excellent book, and a nice change if you’ve been reading too many of the “and of course the gypsies came from Atlantis” kind of books.

She also has a popular YouTube channel and sings from time to time.

Incidentally, I think she might be quite irritated to learn that she was the inspiration for one of my biggest breakthroughs whilst writing the book. Normally, entropy is described as a measure of disorder. Sabine points out that it is actually a measure of possibilities. We only think of it as disorder because most of the possibilities will normally be disordered ones. This led directly for me to how the timeless multiverse is structured.

What do you call yourself?

When I first started researching magic, I called myself a magician. This went very well until I was talking to a friend of mine and mentioned that I was a magician.

“Oooh,” she said, “I love Jerry Sadowitz!”

“Yeah, so do I, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”

So I started calling myself a wizard. I had a brief period of doubt later on when Antony Mackie in “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” said that “a sorcerer was just a wizard without a hat on“.

Should I be wearing a hat? Or should I call myself a sorcerer?

No, and no. I don’t have the beard to go with the hat, and if ‘wizard’ seems pretentious, then ‘sorcerer’ kicks it up a large notch.

I’ve been in progressive rock bands so I know a bit about pretension.

A couple of friends of mine got quite annoyed at me calling myself a wizard. Probably because they thought I was going off my head. Impressed that, so far, no-one has said “What, like Harry Potter?”

Harry Potter is fictional. Real wizards are not as exciting as pretend wizards.”

Best moment was a friend of a friend, who, when he saw a picture of me breathing fire, said “Is he a god?”

“No,” my friend said sadly, “just a wizard.”