The hierarchy problem (finetuning) of the Standard Model of particle physics is often presented as the question 'why the weak scale is so much smaller than the Planck scale' But there is also a geometric interpretation that can be understood with little maths (but a lot of physics) 🧵1/11

Short explanation of the physics Nobel Prize 2025 In classical mechanics you can know where a particle is and its momentum at the same time. In Quantum mechanics you can't. All information is in the wavefunction. Even if a particle is trapped, part of the wavefunction.. 🧵1/7

This night 102 years ago, Hubble discovered that there're stars outside our galaxy by observing a Cepheid variable star 1 million light years away Until barely a century ago, no human ever knew whether there was more than one galaxy in the Universe. Think about that!

Today LHCb presented a new measurement of the decay of a B meson into a K* and a μ+ μ- pair Previous results disagreed with the Standard Model prediction for the branching fraction and angular distribution The new measurement has almost twice as much data and still disagrees! 🧵1/6

In 3 (or more) dimensions, all fundamental particles are either fermions and bosons. But why? This is a direct consequence of the properties of the configuration space for identical particles 🧵 1/14

Here is it: The worlds best measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon In great agreement with previous experimental results and in agreement with the Standard Model prediction using the LO HVP contribution from lattice input

Livestream of the final result of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon measurement at Fermilab right now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=huLv...

Before the charm quark was discovered in bound states, it was predicted via indirect effects. An early success story of the electroweak model and QFT! Mary Gaillard and John Rosner, who both passed last week, contributed to calculating the charm quark mass 🧵1/11

Even if you don't care one bit about scientific research, it's important to recognise the value of publicly funding people working on very hard problems and training bright young minds on how to solve them.

Excellent news: Germany invests €200M in fundamental physics, funding clusters in Mainz, Siegen, Bonn, Dortmund, Munich & Hamburg focused on particle physics, astrophysics & cosmology The selection of *all* fundamental physics finalists marks a major boost in support! www.dfg.de/de/service/p...

Are neutrinos their own anti-particles? They are the only fundamental fermions that could have this unique property. But they're so elusive, how could we figure that out? A brilliant experiment could answer this question without detecting a single neutrino 🧵1/11

Does quantum mechanics really need to be complex? Why can't we just use real wavefunctions? 🧵1/15 *some math, non-relativistic QM

The proton (uud) is lighter than the neutron (udd) because the up quark is lighter than the down quark. Then why is the delta resoncance Δ++ (uuu) heavier than both? This can be fully understood via a symmetry argument 1/12

Renormalisation is a central concept in modern physics. It describes how the dynamics of a system change at different scales. A great way to understand and visualise renormalisation is the Ising model (some math, but one can follow without it ) 1/13

A search for additional Higgs bosons has found evidence for Toponium, a bound state from top quark-antiquark pairs that has the mass of two gold atoms, decays in 5x 10^-25 s and 1% the size of a proton. This wasn’t expected to be observable at the LHC cerncourier.com/a/cms-observ...

Physicists in Innsbruck have shown for the first time that it is possible to create quantum superpositions from thermally excited states (mixed states instead of pure states) phys.org/news/2025-04...

All supernovas ever observed, tens of thousands of dying stars Once the Rubin Observatory is completed it will be able to see several millions of supernovas, dwarfing what we've seen so far This is from a brilliant website by Isaac Shivvers. ishivvers.github.io/maps/sne.html

Big fan of this description of science from @martinmbauer.bsky.social I like that it accurately captures the role of so-called "giants", as people who see the structure of large amounts of previous work of the innumerable vital scientists who usually don't make it into the history books

Do you want to see what it'd look like to fly through the DESI map of the Universe? Our Universe is absolutely huge. Each dot here is a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQkF...

🔭 Blue Ghost on the Moon Image Credit: Firefly Aerospace apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25030...

What happens if a planet gets too close to a white dwarf? Data from NASAs X-ray telescope Chandra suggest a white dwarf only 650ly from earth is slowly ripping a planet apart via tidal forces. This could explain variations in the X-ray spectrum observed since the 80s chandra.si.edu/photo/2025/h...

Excellent FAQ on the Majorana qubit chip from Microsoft by Scott Aaronson: scottaaronson.blog?p=8669

The most energetic neutrino ever observed just smashed into the Mediterranean and left a signal that was picked up by the K3Mnet neutrino telescope 2400m under the sea At the moment we don't really know where this neutrino came from, nor should they really be there. A short 🧵1/10

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Ep3 of the "Case for a new collider" series is out! Why is mapping the Higgs potential at a new collider so important? Such a mapping may allow us to understand how the universe may end and why we are even here to ask any questions at all. 🧪⚛️ Link: youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Really interesting interview with the incoming Director General cerncourier.com/a/a-word-wit...

It’s the year 100 AQM www.sciencenews.org/article/quan...

The US government now instructs CDC scientists to withdraw, halt or remove their names from research papers that are currently in the publication process to screen the language for "forbidden terms" So much for free speech. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

My debate with Luke Barnes on whether the Universe is fine-tuned for life is online. Let me know what you think! www.youtube.com/watch?app=de...

Fascinating finding: animo acids, the building blocks of life, have been found on asteroids However on Earth, they're almost all left-handed; on asteroids, left and right-handed variants appear in equal amounts This will help to determine how life developed on earth www.nature.com/articles/d41...

She isn't wrong: “It is outdated that we have legislative scrutiny carried out by representatives of one Christian denomination. The only other legislature that has religious theocrats as members by right is Iran” www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

George RR Martin and the physicist Ian Tregillis published a paper deriving a Lagrangian to model the spread of the wild card virus Goes to show both the power of the variational principle and how creative G.RR.Martin has become in avoiding to write winds of winter pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/art...

Feynman: "We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery....

My colleagues in Durham used optical tweezers to realise long-lived entanglement between pairs of molecules The progress in this field is astonishing phys.org/news/2025-01...

Quantum field theory predicts that light can scatter off light, an effect beyond classical electrodynamics. Maxwells equations are linear such that two photons never interact with each other 1/3

European recommendation letter: This is a good candidate I've worked with closely for 3 years. Here is a page with the most notable achievements US recommendation letter: This candidate will 100% win a Nobel prize. We met for 30 min on a conference once and here are 8 pages explaining why

2025 could be the year we see the first solid state nuclear clock Nuclear clocks keep time 10x better than the best atomic clocks and have the potential to be much more robust We are in the process of witnessing a breakthrough! physicsworld.com/a/solid-stat...

Nice interview with @astrokatie.com in @cerncourier.bsky.social cerncourier.com/a/exploding-...

#PhysicsJournalClub "Blending Optimal Control and Biologically Plausible Learning for Noise-Robust Physical Neural Networks" by S. Sunada et. al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 017301 (2025) a 🧵 1/ 🧪🎢

Physicists have analysed which body shape is ideal for hula hooping. It won't come as a surprise to any father who ever tried to keep up with his kids: "Crucially, the body cross-section must be concave or hourglass shaped and with a sufficiently curvy “waist”"

Durham on the weekend from Liam McCormick

If a+b+c=pi

Really nice, short ASCI history of physics (from Piet Hut, IAS) From the babylonians to Aristoteles: 🧵 1/12

Really nice, short ASCI history of physics (from Piet Hut, IAS) From the babylonians to Aristoteles: 🧵 1/12

Happy New Year everyone! 1925 was a pivotal year in physics history in which Heisenberg realised that there are fundamentally non-commuting observables, ringing the death knell for classical determinism Let‘s see what 2025 brings!

Every single research group I ever worked in was highly international - in the UK, US and Germany. 1/5

Explains why Santa is so difficult to observe: Colliding children at very high energy is currently the only known method to produce Santa Claus

Could we tell whether anyone in our galaxy uses a warp drive? This sounds like a crazy question, but it can be answered using numerical GR (one of the fun highlights of the annual theory meeting presented by Katy Clough) 🧵1/7

The annual theory meeting in the UK (the Christmas meeting) is underway! Todays topics and speakers are: Prospects of the HL-LHC : Sinead Farrington Numerical relativity for fundamental physics : Katy Clough Random Matrix Theory & 2d CFT : Eric Perlmutter Black hole states: Roberto Emparan

Here you can download the original phd thesis of Hugh Everett III introducing what would later become "The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" It's very readable and only 36 pages: calisphere.org/item/ark:/81...