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.