Another eland today, along with a personal best Saturday time. Not sure if I’ve ever actually seen “oribi” with its less common vowels.

10 min after handing out the first in-class exam in my quantum mechanics course, a young lady I don’t recognize comes in and sits down. Sometimes students skip the lectures and only show up for exams, so I hand her the exam and say “when you finish, staple your work together and turn it in.”

My only complaint with today’s American university is when they are radicalizing students against the concept of relativistic mass.

I remember as a kid having a book of NYT crosswords and it suggested if the clue is “African antelope,” 5 letters, you might pencil in “eland” or “oribi”. Finally got to use it on the final word today.

Science takes a team! At CWRU Physics, we’re bridging disciplines with Expansion Microscopy—embedding cells in gels and stretching them to study their inner workings. Here, Dr. Marouen Zammali optimizes hydrogels for maximum expansion. #askmeaboutmyresearch #CWRU #physics #micrs

Don’t mind me, just wringing out my pants into my office wastebasket. Misjudged the weather a bit before biking to work.

I made a quantum foundations alignment chart — go forth and fight about it! (also, "good" is not an endorsement)

This compound angle has required the most thought of any cut I’ve done. Wish me luck.

Can we understand consciousness with AI and quantum? I think this quote from me in Popular Mechanics accurately sums up my skepticism. ⚛️🧪

Last night’s insomnia rabbit hole: Do mirrors flip images left-right? Why not up-down? Our brains seem to have a bias towards certain rotations, probably due to the symmetry and typical motion of the human body. And this can help explain why special relativity is so counterintuitive. (1/7) 🧵🧪⚛️

Let me try to explain why it's important to study the foundations of quantum mechanics. (1/n) (Have to do some breathing exercises, b/c to me it's blindingly obvious that "understanding the most important theory in physics" is something physicists should care about, but apparently opinions differ.)

“Republicans look at the Republican Party, slowly digesting deep within Trump’s belly, and think, this looks good to me.”

After years of teaching quantum, I just realized that I have gotten this equation, at the heart of QM, backwards. It’s not saying that the frequency f of a particle’s wave function is given by its energy E. It’s saying that energy is *defined* as the frequency of the wave function. ⚛️🧪 (1/4)

Replacing the seats on some Adirondack chairs I built about 15 years ago. Yeah, those were probably not good to sit on anymore.

Thanks, AI overview, for giving my 11 yr old an inferiority complex.

Writing about how nuclear decay can be understood through the Many Worlds picture of quantum mechanics, and I'm stymied with confusion over which is the anode and which is the cathode. ...can I just call them both "electrodes?" Just saying, electrochemistry is more confusing than QM.

Achieving a quantum advantage with billiard balls? Following up on my visualizations of quantum gates using billiard-ball-like particles, here’s a 🧵 on visualizing a quantum algorithm with speedup over its classical counterpart. (1/15) ⚛️🧪

Quantum computing with billiard balls? The operation of a quantum computer is usually described with abstract mathematics. This 🧵 is part 1 of my attempt to visualize what is going on based on examples developed in my quantum tutorial, Catland: jablab.case.edu/catland/ (1/14) ⚛️🧪

We're so excited to see #CWRU Physics @cyrusctaylor.bsky.social in APS @apsphysics.bsky.social's 'A visit to Mount Kilimanjaro spurs career pivot. Cyrus Taylor, once a high-energy experimentalist, sees climate change as his calling—& physics as a tool for the public good.' tinyurl.com/CWRUcyrus 🎉

Great fun today giving a guest lecture in Modern Physics on interpretations of quantum mechanics. Got to use my quantum measurement demo, and I think blow a mind or two. ⚛️🧪

Optics people: the tiny feet of these water bugs make these big oval shadows surrounded by a bright ring. Does anyone have a good explanation for why that happens? ⚛️

One of my favorite Easter traditions: @radiofreetom.bsky.social posting his family recipe for roast lamb, and then everyone trying to dunk on each other re garlic powder.

It's that time of the year... #Physics & @mlb.com baseball! Professor BOB BROWN reveals secret behind torpedo bats: I-Team fox8.com/news/i-team/... #CWRU ⚾️ Let's go Cleveland Guardians!

Looking forward to attending the Michelson Postdoctoral Prize Lectureships this week by Chapin Korosec, PhD at @physicscwru.bsky.social! Link has info on the 3 talks being held 4/7, 4/8, and 4/10: physics.case.edu/2024-michels...

On the way to CLE airport this morning couldn’t resist telling the kids, “oh, you thought we were going to Orlando Florida to visit Disney? No, we said we were going to the Orlando *bread factory* to visit the billboard of *Misny*.”

It's great to see so many #CWRU students & faculty at the APS Global Physics Summit in Anaheim! 🎉🔬🔭@casewestern.bsky.social @apsphysics.bsky.social

In the run up to St. Patrick’s day, I have seen two separate articles explaining unrelated confusing things about this picture I took when stopping for gas in Ireland.

Here’s a neat Schrödinger equation simulation I just did demonstrating the double slit “which path” experiment. In short, when we treat the particle detectors as quantum objects the result is an entangled state in which the different outcomes play out as if they are in different “worlds.” ⚛️🧪 (1/7)

These kids are the anti-Ruby Bridges. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/u...

As a physicist, I am excited to share my first publication in a musicology journal! With my collaborator @alex-cooke.bsky.social at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Ryan Buechele, and a then-physics and music major at CWRU and now an OSU physics PhD student. ⚛️🧪 🧵 (1/7)

This is wonderful. I have long wished for an approach to visualizing states in a QFT picture.

Quantum measurement demo is complete. A particle starting on the right side of the box launches a cascade of increasingly large particles down the right track. Vice versa on the left. But what if we start a particle in a quantum superposition of left and right? (1/5) ⚛️🧪

Just got this app. Gives you scripts on various issues and phone numbers for your elected representatives. And reminders you can set to make some calls. apps.apple.com/us/app/5-cal...

6:19 for a Friday puzzle is a new record for me that I don’t think I’ll break any time soon.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are good things.

The new version of the quantum measurement demo is coming along nicely. ⚛️

Wow not bullshit

It’s that time of year again where my quantum computing class gets to make Bloch spheres out of oranges. ⚛️

Is the universe a sphere, like the surface of Earth? Or maybe it’s shaped like a doughnut? Cosmologists believe that these possibilities could leave clues in the sky. New methods could help find them. https://buff.ly/3PTCOTo

One of my favorite ways to spend an evening: designing crazy crap in solidworks.

I was added to the science feed poster's list by @physgal.bsky.social and while I still don't understand what that means... I'm pleased. So here's my most physics related piece. Q is for quantum. #sciart 🧪

⚛️ #Quantum #Physics; so strange, subtle, & hard to make sense of. In 2025, a quantum centenary, I'll take on some of its difficult questions on my blog. To start: the (in)famous double-slit experiment, examined with the extreme care that it requires: profmattstrassler.com/2025/01/16/d...

I made this pointer today on the water jet. When you measure a quantum state, what is the resulting quantum state of a macroscopic pointer on the measurement apparatus? ⚛️

First prototype of my quantum measurement demo. An Arduino queries a quantum random number generator (hosted at qrng.anu.edu.au) to randomly choose “L” or “R”, then triggers a servo motor to tip the pointer to the left or right. ⚛️🧪

“this idea of a phase transition can give you a boost of confidence. You might be a lot closer than you realize to solving the whole thing, as long as you can just get a little bit better and jump over that phase transition point.” arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Currently at #CES, demoing my app for generative music composition and video scoring, viviscore.ai. I took this video today and added music using the app... the little shimmy near the beginning nearly kills me every time. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF1p...

We are hiring! Check out the job ad for a postdoctoral researcher in nanoscale microscopy & rare earth element separations here: case.edu/academic-car... #physics #chemistry #careers #REEs #postdocjobs

Job ad! My college "invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning with specialization in natural, social or mathematical sciences." academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/29524 1/

This is great. The whole “virtual particle” thing had me confused from age 17 or so (reading pop physics books) until about this year (age 45). I guess it’s fine for particle physicists to think about virtual particles, but it’s a horrible way to explain it to non-specialists.