Working at the CERN Courier is a great honour, and I am deeply grateful for it. This time, we had the pleasure of wrestling with the history of quarkonia, the X17 anomaly, ATLAS's confirmation of a top-antitop excess, and much more. I hope you'll enjoy our latest issue!

I jumped on board as the train was shooting past at supersonic speed, but working on such a significant issue is a honour I struggle to capture in a post. Go and read the new #CERNCourier – before I get too emotional!

One hundred years ago today, Werner Heisenberg wrote to Wolfgang Pauli of radical ideas about quantum mechanics. As this special anniversary edition of #CERNCourier shows, a century has not sufficed to fully understand or apply the theory. Read it now: cerncourier.com/p/magazine/

The CERN Courier has been the high-energy physics magazine for almost seventy years. On a smaller scale, it has been my personal, essential source of information on the field. It is thus with great pleasure that I announce I have joined it as an Associate Editor. I’ll do my best!

I’ll spend my next week at Helgoland, celebrating 100 years of #quantum mechanics on Heisenberg’s legendary eureka island. If you’ll attend the conference as well, come shake my hand! 🧪🔬🔭

Just found this (Italian!) YouTube breakdown of Laws of Physics by physicist @davidedebiasio.bsky.social on his channel Spazi Attorcigliati. He dives into the first 20 pages—ontology, nomology, laws as constraints. I'm honored! Thanks to #ChatGPT I could follow along! www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDBD...

How many parallel worlds are there out there? How many copies of you, living almost identical lives, are reading these very lines? How can we answer such questions?

I am surprised and saddened that hundreds of students graduate from QFT courses thinking that renormalisation is a trick and having no idea what an EFT is.

What if the universe hides a tiny extra dimension just a few micrometers across? How may string theory shape the world we observe? Where shall we look for experimental signatures of quantum gravity? 1/4

A world where many possess nuclear bombs is tragic and dangerous. Yet, one in which only a few have them - and wield that power to subjugate, dominate and exterminate with impunity - is even worse. 1/2

Let me be clear: there wasn't a single instance in which Elon Musk displayed a sound grasp of physics – despite pretending otherwise. He was a charlatan long before his Nazi era.

Do you know how sick you get when Elon Musk opens his mouth on history and politics? Well, that's how physicists have felt for years. The man is the biggest bluff of the third millennium, a mishmash of Reddit threads and clickbait YouTube videos. Now, with a fresh sprinkle of neo-Nazism.

Here is the table of contents page

I don't know if the European leaders will stab #Ukraine in the back. I do know, however, that no one will force me to call ‘peace’ an agreement that neither restores the country's legal borders, nor punishes war criminals. Peace is such only when it's just.

I'm ready to die on this hill: the Ukrainian resistance is one of the clearest examples of modern anti-imperialism – and should be treated accordingly. Seeing Ukraine as a ‘proxy’ is not only anti-historical, but deprives an entire people of agency, desires, and aspirations of freedom. 1/N

On my 🇮🇹 YouTube channel (luckily for all non-speakers!) I'm hosting a weekly commentary on the Feynman Lectures on Physics. Each session lasts over two hours, with explicit calculations and digressions into contemporary research. The audience's passionate response fills me with joy – and hope! 🔭🧪🔬

I strongly advise you to go follow the ISQG official profile!

Can we chop the world forever? Will there come a time, in our shift from cells to molecules, atoms, and particles, when reality will reject our attempts to dissect it? Is there a point beyond which the concept of ‘part’ loses any meaning? youtu.be/4LPBZerOcpA 🔬🧪⚛️🔭 #physics #science #quantum #bit

So... What do the 'cancel culture is bad' people think of the latest developments? All I hear is an unsurprising silence. If anyone needed proof, free speech was never the point. Never.

Authors if you see this, it's a sign to post the first line of your book. "The night tore with a whistle, ripped open by Tupoc’s blows. Shreds of bark flew against him. He spat. With the free hand, he wiped his face—slick with sweat, gnats, and splinters of wood."

At @stsucl.bsky.social I spent a wonderful year learning about the interplay between science, society, history, and culture – while sharpening my science communication tools. Plus (as you can see from their post), they are way kinder than I’d deserve!

Jesus is one of the strongest #DEI advocates in the Western canon.

What kind of procedure do we employ when we slice up the world, picking out chairs, sandwiches, and parrots? And what do atoms have to do with all this? Check out the lecture I gave at UCL's Chemical Engineering Department, discussing the philosophy of atoms! www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oQx... ⚛️🔭🧪🔬

“We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer.” Adorno

attempting to collect #scicomm focused #physics and #astronomy accounts into one #starterpack! this list is by no means complete—if I've missed you, please just shoot me a DM. go.bsky.app/NvQERru

No observation can actually tell you if my weird pronounciation resembles more “Qkwaark” or “Qkwork”. I call this the quœrk confinement.

Over the past thirty years, science communication around the quest for a theory of quantum gravity has become awfully polarised. From all fronts -and there are many, in this case- information and propaganda, thorough criticism and strawmen mixed like milk and coffee. 🧪⚛️🔭 1/5 #science #physics

Turns out I’m moving to Krakow, in Poland! 🥟🇵🇱 Is there anyone around here who works on quantum gravity, string theory, or foundations/philosophy of physics? Let’s connect! #physics #poland ⚛️🧪🔭

Whatever your discipline, I urge you to engage with philosophical works problematising its foundations. Here, for example, is a fresh paper by @mattfarr.bsky.social on the ways in which relativity conflicts with our intuitive notion of time. This is stuff physicists should read! #physics 🧪⚛️🔭

Let’s run the government like a business, drive the car like a bicycle, and play the guitar like a piano

The most common issue with special relativity accounts is that they allude to states of absolute motion, with phrases as 'the clock of a moving observer slows down'. Of course, all these effects are frame-dependent and the paradoxes get resolved by the relativity of simultaneity. #physics 🧪⚛️🔭

This is incredibly cool. Take my repost as a pin, a reminder, a shoutout, and a way of congratulating the author!

Scientists, when do we start lobbying for #Bluesky to implement native LaTeX support? #science #physics #mathematics 🧪⚛️

By the way: given the level of animosity I found when communicating speculative theories that would take a 500 light-year particle accelerator to be tested, I can’t imagine what it is like to deal with vaccines, biology, history or political science. You have my sincerest admiration. 🧪⚛️ #science

Both in my independent science communication work and in the one I do for the ISQG, my primary goal is to deflate the toxic, polarised, propaganda-driven public discourse around quantum gravity. People have been rallying the troops for far too long, it’s time to go back to decency and kindness. 🧪⚛️

If you want a straightforward introduction to string theory and the broader issue of quantum gravity, here you have my September lecture at the Royal Institution! 🧪⚛️ youtu.be/B-47G6XKFfA?... #physics #quantum #spacetime

Given the recent wave of new users, I think it's time to introduce myself officially! I’m Davide, born and raised in a regular nine-pointed Venetian fortress - almost on the border between Italy and Slovenia. Hence, perhaps, I got so hooked on geometry.

The #SciComm starter pack is almost full. Make sure to revisit it as l’ve added lots of folk this week. Do share it and flag up if you’d like added. go.bsky.app/VJQzace

I am about to leave Japan. I have been here just over two months, devoting more than half of that time to the 88 temples pilgrimage of Shikoku. I walked, walked and walked some more, among rice paddies and mountains, along oceanic shores or streets of wooden shacks. 1/2

Rule of thumb: If an AI tool “feels illegal”, it probably is.

I am aware that Kuhn considered textbooks to be epiphenomena of normal science, of those times when a true consensus prevails within a scientific community. Still, it would be lovely if more researchers articulated their positions on controversial topics in self-contained monographs. 1/4

I’ve just read a great work by Jacobson, part of Berkenstein’s memorial volume, in which he quickly summarises the historical development of our understanding of entropy. I had no idea Landau hinted at non-separability in 1917, nor that Lemaitre tamed horizons! arxiv.org/abs/1810.07839 #physics

Ok, #quantum #physics Bluesky people: how do you like your quantum foundations? Are states ontic, epistemic or a secret, more complex third thing? #philosophy #science #debate

So… where are the quantum gravity, philosophy of physics, foundations people?

I'm right in the middle of teaching about momentum, impulse, and collisions. As anyone who's taught this before knows, units are a mess. I ran across this petition earlier this year, and am trying it. Response is +. Please consider supporting it. #iTeachPhysics www.change.org/p/honor-emmy...

Thanks to self-reference, we are one Gödelisation away from proving Bluesky’s incompleteness.

If you claim to fight protecting some values, those should reflect in the way your fight is lead. Otherwise, what you protect is power.

This is a truly horrendous way of hitting rock bottom. Prime minister Sunak and his henchpeople have declared war on intellectual freedom, hoping to flip the polls. It is not going to happen. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... 🧪⚛️👩‍🔬🇬🇧

Results: There is a 100% correlation between me graduating at a given university and said university winning a Nobel Prize in the same year. Methodology: We studied exactly one data point. 🧪👩‍🔬⚛️