My latest in Quanta! 🧪

New story out, in case quantum mechanics wasn't already bewildering enough for you!

I wrote a little reflection on my love of the abstract, from physics to David Lynch movies

Isn’t it always true of Einstein-esque breakthroughs that you can’t see them coming? My first official newsletter is live on my Substack!

In quantum information theory, “magic” is a property of entangled qubits that makes their state difficult to simulate on a classical computer. “It’s an appalling word,” said the physicist Martin White. But after 20 years, there’s probably no changing it now.

For my latest in Quanta, I explore recent measurements that treat the Large Hadron Collider as a giant quantum computer, and what some physicists hope these sorts of measurements can reveal about quantum mechanics, amid skepticism.

Hi! Today @quantamagazine.bsky.social published a special issue on climate science, featuring stories about how Earth's climate fundamentally works that I needed to read after covering climate impacts for so many years. I hope you'll check it out! <3 www.quantamagazine.org/how-we-came-...

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After a long break, my podcast 'Why This Universe?' is starting up again! In our first episode of the season, Nobel prize-winner Adam Riess shares his story of the discovery that dark energy is powering the expansion of space. Listen to the whole episode here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/9...

And here's another one I wrote with @quantamagazine.bsky.social 🧪:

Thanks for the shout-out @seanmcarroll.bsky.social! And a funny coincidence—the Fourier transform really is everywhere you look.

My latest story is out in Quanta Magazine. Had a lot of fun digging into both history and math for this one!

Fingers crossed. Keep telling your members of Congress this is important.

My last story with Quanta dove deeeeep into quantum crystals. You can’t read about research this fresh anywhere else! 🧪

BREAKING: The United States of America

Nazi Germany did literally ban Nature: "Articles are often published in the London weekly scientific journal Nature containing outrageous and vile attacks on German science and the national socialist state. The journal must therefore be excluded from general use in the scientific libraries."

I am no fan of Springer, but to preempt objections that this is hyperbolic language, the Nazis literally banned the same journals and justified the decision using very similar rhetoric.

The National Science Foundation is getting kicked out of their building

First images from the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory are out! Rubin sees an area on the sky of about 9.6 square degrees with a 3.2 Gigapixel resolution. This is like taking a picture of a football field from a mile away and still being able to resolve the thickness of a dime on the field. ⚛️🧪

New paper: "Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective" (D. Krakauer, J. Krakauer, M. Mitchell). We look at claims of "emergent capabilities" & "emergent intelligence" in LLMs from the perspective of what emergence means in complexity science. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135

The civilian wing of the MAGA movement is attempting to murder Democrats and their spouses in their homes. The state wing of the MAGA movement is arresting Democrats for performing their official duties. The MAGA movement is trying to make it illegal to oppose Trump.

what is it called when people who aren't cops and don't have a warrant drag you away, because I don't think "arrest" is the word

Wired continuing to do great + important work for the political moment!

So much waste and harm could be avoided if we just treated these as fragile, dangerous tools suited for very specialized use cases, like we do with lasers and circular saws, and not as magic thinking beans

This is very thorough and very good. Among other things, it reiterates that the fact LLMs only "tell the truth" sometimes (but bullshit with utter confidence) is a feature, not a bug. It can't be simply fixed post hoc. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

I'm reading Meghan O'Gieblyn's "God, Human, Animal, Machine" and now I can't stop seeing its argument everywhere: that the whole idea of the technological singularity is the newest iteration in a long history of religious prophecies — a metaphor taken literally.

I would love to think that everyone has known for a long time that LLMs aren't going to lead to "general intelligence," but all the evidence suggests there are plenty of people who resist this, so it's good to have a paper from researchers Apple making the point strongly.

Mark is such a talented and passionate science illustrator it was a pleasure to work together on this!

For my latest story at @quantamagazine.bsky.social I dug into cutting edge research that’s using geometry to understand the bizarre quantum behaviors of materials. Huge shoutout to @markabelan.bsky.social for bringing the abstract ideas to life with 3D graphics!

This is tickling the part of my brain that got me excited to work on video game physics in the past—cognitive science taking inspiration from computer graphics!

In light of this deeply illegal activity at NSF and the ongoing attack on American science, I'm posting the slides from my 2017 talk at the American Physical Society about the Nazi take over of German physics/why German is no longer science's lingua franca 🧪 🧵 1/26 drive.google.com/file/d/1_MCm...

Enjoying the diversity of opinion at the Natural Philosophy Symposium, ft. @seanmcarroll.bsky.social and Nima Arkani-Hamed

This EO is a lot of words for a rule that basically says, political appointees will overrule scientists in deciding what the government considers factual information.

The conceptual consequences of Noether’s theorem are hard to overstate.

As a physics journalist, it is fairly wild to see the names of the PIs with terminated grants: Misha Lukin, Philip Kim, Lisa Randall, Subir Sachdev, John Doyle... bsky.app/profile/benn...

“My deep and abiding feeling is that if you look at anything closely enough, there will be new riches to be found.” — Sidney Nagel, physicist at the University of Chicago

I guess thinking is counterculture now

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging." Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council. I wrote about my decision in TIME. time.com/7285045/resi...

Just a few days after Columbia announces the Pulitzers, the university goes and suspends its own student journalists.

"Celgene had kept the price of Thalomid low when it was initially intended for AIDS patients...as the company “didn’t want huge numbers of people demonstrating in front” of its office. That wasn’t a problem with cancer patients. There was “plenty of room for very substantial increases”..."

"It’s been more than two months since Israel cut off all humanitarian aid and commercial supplies into Gaza... Two million Palestinians in Gaza, nearly half of them children, are now surviving on a single meal every two or three days."

It's incredibly irresponsible to report on the "antisemitism problem at Harvard" without mentioning the way that fascists are using a moral panic about antisemitism to attack academic freedom, jail dissidents, and illegally deport ethnic and religious minorities.

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"A maggot knows things about the outside world in a way that no computer does." Read @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social fun + fascinating feature: AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothin...

AI is changing what it means to do science and what it means to be a scientist. Today, we are publishing a series that explores this shift. Here’s what’s in it 🧵 www.quantamagazine.org/ai-changes-s...

Critically, Republicans have terminated ~800 NIH grants over 8 weeks. But that's only half the story. *Republicans have also cancelled nearly 1,000 NSF grants in 8 *days*. The work continues. Report your terminated NSF grant here: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni...

A STAT EXCLUSIVE NIH moving to ban all future grants to universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts, document suggests www.statnews.com/2025/04/21/t...

I covered some exciting new research exploring the possibility of a new kind of quantum particle for @quantamagazine.bsky.social, check it out! 🧪

just heard of a phd student's funding being cut because they were studying "diverse magnetic properties"