# What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence| New Year's Edition: Big ideas, precision measurements, and prebiotic molecules.

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968/what-s-new-in-science-with-sabine-and-lawrence-new-year-s-edition-big-ideas-precision-measurements-and-prebiotic-molecules
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968/what-s-new-in-science-with-sabine-and-lawrence-new-year-s-edition-big-ideas-precision-measurements-and-prebiotic-molecules.md
Podcast: [The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-origins-podcast-with-lawrence-krauss-505968)
Published: 2025-12-31T19:26:51+00:00
Episode link: https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/p/whats-new-in-science-with-sabine-6ca
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/183035423/994f03b9a3c06a6c08c164f3a3e60722.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3216

## Resource

New Year’s Eve always comes with that familiar urge to clean the slate, toss out what didn’t hold up, and keep what actually earned its place. That’s basically the spirit of our latest “What’s New in Science” episode with Sabine Hossenfelder. We began with the season’s favorite shiny object: wormholes. The headlines have been everywhere, but we talked through why most of these stories quietly slide from “a speculative tool in a model” to “a virtual phenomenon that might be useful in calculations.” Traversable wormholes of course still run straight into hard constraints like negative energy and the time machine problem. From there we moved to something much more grounded: CERN. ATLAS has now observed the Higgs decaying into muon pairs, which is exactly the kind of precise confirmation you want for the Standard Model, and while it is yet another remarkable confirmation of how well the fundamental feature of the Standard Model works, it once again sharpens the contrast with the inexplicable nature of the only feature that doesn’t seem to fit: neutrino masses. And it leaves us hanging about where to look next. We next spent time on what the future might look like for big particle collider projects and what it says about the field’s priorities, including the signal sent by China’s latest five-year plan, which no longer features a massive circular collider proposal. We touched on a smaller CERN result as well, and used it to reflect on a broader point: some of the most stubborn, interesting physics lives in regimes that are messy rather than glamorous. Then we took a quick detour into a quantum gravity-adjacent proposal about whether the way we average quantities in general relativity could matter for quantum corrections, and finally landed on a genuinely satisfying closer:…

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