I love flowers, especially fields of them. This is Olga Wisinger-Florian's Blooming Poppies, ca. 1895-1900, Oil on Cardboard, 70 x 98 cm, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria Canvas H/T: @APainting_ADay on Twitter, Belvedere from my visit in 2017.

A conversation about understanding, intentions, and natural-language simulations: chatgpt.com/share/6883d0... 🧪💡

Happy 4th of July! 🇺🇸

In early March, the Nobel Laureates Ferenc Krausz and Serge Haroche returned from their visit to #Ukraine with strong and lasting impressions. With their documentary, the two researchers draw attention to the dramatic circumstances 📹 peace4europa.org

Happy Canada day! 🇨🇦 🍁 🇨🇦

Me, a year ago: "Perturbation theory is always the same, second quantization is just filling in the gaps." 6000 lines of code and docs later: Pymablock v2.2.0 released🎉 pymablock.readthedocs.io/en/v2.2.0/ We have bosons, spins, fermions, and Floquet, and I'm quite happy about it.

🧪⚛️ Most researchers don't choose a country but a receptive environment for work, and nimbly move across continents to do so. The proposed cuts in federal funding would create a hostile environment that could repel the next generation of scientists from the US. This'd be a major loss for the nation.

The President's 2026 NSF budget request: nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF... Overall cut: 55% MPS directorate cut: $1B+ Expected # awards: 2300, down from 9600 Expected acceptance rate: 7%, down from 26% Expected # of supported PhD students: 12400, down from 41500 🧪⚛️

Oof. Another instance of mistaking quantum theory as a theory of consciousness or a theory of mind. People, if they could exist, would have free will even in a completely classic, deterministic world.

Please read this thread, it is a factual and honest account of how research misconduct happens, from the point of view of a then-PhD student. Takes almost 10 years to mount the courage to come forward with it publicly!

An NSF PO on its upcoming 75th anniversary: "In nature, systems evolve towards minimum of energy, following the laws of physics. In the US today things evolve to a location of maximum pain, violating the laws of the land." www.linkedin.com/posts/tomasz...

FYI: The Spencer Foundation, Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have collaborated to offer $25K rapid response grants. "This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF."

I keep seeing the puzzled question: why all the cuts to science funding? Don't they know it harms our economy? The answer is simple—it's what all culture warriors & ideologues do: a cultural revolution. Where they can, they close the universities. Where they can't, they cut their funding.

I am happy to see @spie.org put out this call to action for advocacy in support of federal science funding If you are American, please write to your legislators to encourage them to support the science/research enterprise. You can use the form at the SPIE link below, or write or call directly 🧪💡

The latest assault on US Science funding, a self-inflicted wound that will burn out the engine of our economy and bleed our talent. With 2 pending NSF proposals and 2 planned submissions, this kind of thoughtless action is extremely demoralizing, to say the least. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exclusive: The director of the National Science Foundation announced his resignation today, 16 months before his 6-year term ends, in a letter to staff obtained by Science. scim.ag/42vc3fn

Universities across the United States are implementing budget cuts in response to tariffs, grant cancellations and overhead reductions. A no-brainer way to save money - cancel your Springer Nature subscriptions! These do not add value to research.

Today, Suman Aich will present "Interplay of entanglement and interactions in cavity light-matter systems" using an entangled variational approach he has developed for the study of light-induced phenomena in cavities: MAR-T43.6 in 263C (Level 2) @ 4:24pm summit.aps.org/events/MAR-T...

Hundreds of physicists piled into a room at 8 a.m. to hear more about Microsoft's claims to have made the first topological qubits, but the talk was light on conclusive evidence, and may have raised more questions than it answered. My reporting: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Grateful to APS for accommodating the schedule change. But since they won’t be emailing all attendees to promote my talk (as they did for Microsoft), I’d really appreciate help spreading the word. 📢 “Can we build a topological qubit in 2025?” 📍 Monday, 14:06 | Topological Superconductors: Theory

BREAKING: Henry Legg @henrylegg.bsky.social WILL get a talk at the APS meeting next week! Presumably on Monday, before Microsoft's Tuesday talk. Let everyone know and please be there! More to follow.

Microsoft is receiving a ton of push-back on its quantum computer claims - @kpc.bsky.social has the story www.newscientist.com/article/2471...

I wrote this letter to APS about their promotion of Microsoft's "Majorana 1". When you look at the facts together, you see how a determined agent can take advantage of a professional society's infrastructure. Help me reach APS committee members and officers, their emails are hard to find...

Thank you @maxplanck.de! #StandUpForScience 🧪⚛️

Microsoft's extraordinary claim last month—to have created a bonafide topological qubit—was met with caution by many experts. Now, a physicist is raising specific and substantive concerns about a key test that underlies Microsoft's approach. My reporting: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

To my LGBTQ+ colleagues, friends and others affected by these cuts: You must be exhausted, but you are not alone. Regardless of where we stand on the political spectrum, I hope we can agree that demanding conformity, banning words, or compelling speech is not the way to do real science.

Huh? www.nature.com/articles/d41... "Do you ever feel that agreeing to review an academic paper guarantees a wasted workday?" Well, if you do feel that way, I have an even better suggestion: decline to review! Saves you a day and the authors the headache to deal with your nonsensical review.

👏 Congratulations to Suman Aich, my graduate student, for receiving the APS Global Physics Summit Graduate Student Travel Award to present "Interplay of entanglement and interactions in cavity light-matter systems" on Thu Mar 20, in Session T43.6: summit.aps.org/events/MAR-T.... Be sure to stop by!

Are we witnessing the unveiling of MSFT topocon? I had an unhelpful exchange with the VP, who of course has no time to engage with substantial criticism of their previous work. Instead, he spends his time spreading misleading or false information on LinkedIn. 🧪⚛️

🤬

This is a disgrace to physics and science (and Nature). 🧪⚛️

Looks like the new hyped up Microsoft paper and press coverage is even worse than I thought: The review files contain examples of intentional misleading and false statements; one of the reviewers has a clear conflict of interest; the reviewer recommendation is negative (2 of 4). What else?

This is a mega-thread of all Microsoft problems related to topological qubits. NOTE: I skip the numerous news reports and press releases, this thread is for serious _scientific_ and procedural materials First retraction: Quantized Majorana Conductance, from Nature www.nature.com/articles/nat...

Bluesky Premiere: Documentary on Reproducibility in Condensed Matter Physics www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfpW... A project by @ancurlija.bsky.social

I hope this will be the beginning of what I am sure needs to be a long discussion in our community: arxiv.org/abs/2501.18631

Attending 𝘛𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘘𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘮 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳: 𝘍𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 to deliver lectures on 𝗧𝗼𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗶𝘂𝗺 𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗤𝘂𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗺 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 thanks to UNAM's generous hospitality. The event was formally inaugurated yesterday with full day of talks and posters. sites.google.com/quimica.unam...

It's a cliché to say electrons have spin but they aren't spinning. The question is: what'd it be like if they 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 spinning? The answer is not they would be spinning faster than light speed. That's a classical prediction and wrong. The answer is they'd have quantum spin. ⚛️🎢🧪 OTD: 2/14/23

A conjecture: Any test for whether a program is an AGI is equivalent to the question of whether it's immoral to shut down the program that's telling you not to. 🧪 #AI OTD: 6/2/23

Is there a Copenhagen interpretation of the measurement process in the Heisenberg picture of quantum mechanics? As far as I can tell, the answer is no. Ironically, the name "Copenhagen interpretation" was coined by Heisenberg. ⚛️🎢 OTD: 8/23/23

Looks like Feynman diagrams are now used for college football to figure out the path/route integral of winning.

How many blocks are there in this sculpture? (National Gallery of Arts Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.)

Rest in peace, Ian! 😞 In 2001 I took Superconductivity with Ian Affleck. He spoke & wrote on the board, without notes, in what seemed to me also without taking a breath and faster than I could think let alone understand. It was an exhilarating memorable challenge. phas.ubc.ca/memoriam-ian...

So I decided I needed to know more than the "shut up & calculate" version of quantum physics I've studied. Blown away by @seanmcarroll.bsky.social's 12hr course. I wouldn't say I'm now 💯"Everettian", but Sean sure is compelling in his argument #fangirl 🧪🔭⚛️ www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-many-hid...

E=mc² This of course shows nothing by itself. Like any equation, it refers to the explanations that produce it. Read the original masterpiece explanation, published this month in 1905, here: www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einst... (where Einstein doesn't write E=mc² but something very close to it). ⚛️🎢🧪

1 kg m/s = 1 Noether This sounds like a good idea to me. Momentum is a central quantity of motion. And its conservation is directly related to Noether's seminal theorems. 🎢⚛️🧪 doi.org/10.1119/5.02...

Let my senses settle to the rhythm of my heart's intention as my mind wraps itself in a cocoon of creativity.

"If you publish them without such a theory … they will only be thrown into the heap of observations of former astronomers." — Isaac Newton to Flamsteed on Jan 7, 1694, pressing to obtain observations of the moon to use for his theory of lunar motion. 🧪 ⚛️ 🎢 #philsci

"Engineering the world’s highest cited cat, Larry" by Reese Richardson reeserichardson.blog/2024/07/18/e... 🧪

Very sad news. I met Dale in 2008 when I joined the department as an ICMT postdoc. An accomplished and renowned scientist, an effective and beloved department head, he was kind and generous with his time and joyful to be around. He will be greatly missed. physics.illinois.edu/news/68372

Biden had a bad night. But most of the harm has been self-inflicted by incompetent Democratic politics and politicians. The sooner they stop shooting themselves in the foot and save their credibility by uniting behind the nominee people voted in, the better our chances to actually deafest Trump.