@4gravitons.bsky.social
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Bluesky for the blog 4gravitons.com
Lots of debate over this Kaplan quote. I think even if we trusted him on the tech, he's missing the social factors.
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The Timeline for Replacing Theorists Is Not Technological
Quanta Magazine recently published a reflection by Natalie Wolchover on the state of fundamental particle physics. The discussion covers a lot of ground, but one particular paragraph has gotten the lion's share of the attention. Wolchover talked to Jared Kaplan, the ex-theoretical physicist turned co-founder of Anthropic, one of the foremost AI companies today. Kaplan was one of Nima Arkani-Hamed's PhD students, which adds an extra little punch.
http://4gravitons.com/2026/02/06/the-timeline-for-replacing-theorists-is-not-technological/
2 days ago
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Physicists of Bluesky! I'm looking for a specific type of story from the early days of cyclotron research, for a piece for
@physicstoday.bsky.social
. Have you heard tales of scientists who aligned beams with the naked eye? Know an older physicists who has? Let me know!
3 days ago
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What shapes academia's population pyramid?
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How Much Academic Attrition Is Too Much?
Have you seen "population pyramids"? They're diagrams that show snapshots of a population, how many people there are of each age. They can give you an intuition for how a population is changing, and where the biggest hurdles are to survival. I wonder what population pyramids would look like for academia. In each field and subfield, how many people are PhD students, …
http://4gravitons.com/2026/01/30/how-much-academic-attrition-is-too-much/
9 days ago
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Learn to separate what you were taught for school from what you were taught about the world:
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School Facts and Research Facts
As you grow up, teachers try to teach you how the world works. This is more difficult than it sounds, because teaching you something is a much harder goal than just telling you something. A teacher wants you to remember what you're told. They want you to act on it, and to generalize it. And they want you to do this not just for today's material, but to set a foundation for next year, and the next.
http://4gravitons.com/2026/01/23/school-facts-and-research-facts/
16 days ago
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reposted by
Christopher Berry
18 days ago
add a skeleton here at some point
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reposted by
Ben Brubaker
23 days ago
While I'm on the subject, I just rediscovered this thing I made shortly after buying my Fit in 2017. Is there an audience for Honda Fit x MTG x Quantum Field Theory content? We will find out!
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@chive.pub
does answer part of this question, thanks! Will be interesting seeing what that ends up looking like.
add a skeleton here at some point
23 days ago
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Blatant self-promotion, or a new approach to academic publishing?
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A Paper With a Bluesky Account
People make social media accounts for their pets. Why not a scientific paper? Anthropologist Ed Hagen made a Bluesky account for his recent preprint, "Menopause averted a midlife energetic crisis with help from older children and parents: A simulation study." The paper's topic itself is interesting (menopause is surprisingly rare among mammals, he has a plausible account as to why), but not really the kind of thing I cover here.
http://4gravitons.com/2026/01/16/a-paper-with-a-bluesky-account/
23 days ago
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Lots of discussion lately about whether physics has been making progress. Has medicine?
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On Theories of Everything and Cures for Cancer
Some people are disappointed in physics. Shocking, I know! Those people, when careful enough, clarify that they're disappointed in fundamental physics: not the physics of materials or lasers or chemicals or earthquakes, or even the physics of planets and stars, but the physics that asks big fundamental questions, about the underlying laws of the universe and where they come from.
http://4gravitons.com/2026/01/09/on-theories-of-everything-and-cures-for-cancer/
about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Jacob Aron
about 1 month ago
I'm convinced that assigning funding at random would lead to better outcomes. Put a quality control on it if you like, but if you are already losing half of the money to admin, losing a quarter to bad science/fraud instead would be preferable
add a skeleton here at some point
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Anyone have any idea why this is happening?
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Where Are All These Views Coming From?
It's been a weird year. It's been a weird year for many reasons, of course. But it's been a particularly weird year for this blog. To start, let me show you a more normal year, 2024: Aside from a small uptick in January due to a certain unexpected announcement, this was a pretty typical year. I got 70-80 thousand views from 30-40 thousand unique visitors, spread fairly evenly throughout the year.
http://4gravitons.com/2026/01/02/where-are-all-these-views-coming-from/
about 1 month ago
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CERN just got a Newtonmas gift. We'll see what comes of it.
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For Newtonmas, One Seventeenth of a New Collider
Individual physicists don't ask for a lot for Newtonmas. Big collaborations ask for more. This year, CERN got its Newtonmas gift early: a one billion dollar pledge from a group of philanthropists and foundations, to be spent on their proposed new particle collider. That may sound like a lot of money (and of course it is), but it's only a fraction of the 15 billion euros that the collider is estimated to cost.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/12/26/for-newtonmas-one-seventeenth-of-a-new-collider/
about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Ray
about 2 months ago
And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, was present at the end of the universe, having witnessed every black hole evaporate and every proton decay. Even so, Death would not come.
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reposted by
Katie Mack
about 1 month ago
I hope your gift unboxing went well! đ
add a skeleton here at some point
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Do LLMs obscure provenance in academic writing? Probably. Do academics even track provenance in the first place, though?
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Academia Tracks Priority, Not Provenance
A recent Correspondence piece in Nature Machine Intelligence points at an issue with using LLMs to write journal articles. LLMs are trained on enormous amounts of scholarly output, but the result is quite opaque: it is usually impossible to tell which sources influence a specific LLM-written text. That means that when a scholar uses an LLM, they may get a result that depends on another scholar's work, without realizing it or documenting it.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/12/19/academia-tracks-priority-not-provenance/
about 2 months ago
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reposted by
Elizabeth Gibney
about 2 months ago
Wow. CERN has secured a promise of $1 billion (!) towards its planned Future Circular Collider from private donors (such as the Breakthrough Prize Foundation & Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fund) - the first such donation for CERN, which has until now been taxpayer funded
home.cern/news/press-r...
đ§Șâïž
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Private donors pledge 860 million euros for CERNâs Future Circular Collider
For the first time in CERNâs history, private donors (individuals and philanthropic foundations) have agreed to support a CERN flagship research project. Recently, a group of friends of CERN, includin...
https://home.cern/news/press-release/cern/private-donors-pledge-860-million-euros-cerns-future-circular-collider
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Wondering what energy is? Energy is conserved.
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Energy Is That Which Is Conserved
In school, kids learn about different types of energy. They learn about solar energy and wind energy, nuclear energy and chemical energy, electrical energy and mechanical energy, and potential energy and kinetic energy. They learn that energy is conserved, that it can never be created or destroyed, but only change form. They learn that energy makes things happen, that you can use energy to do work, that energy is different from matter.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/12/12/energy-is-that-which-is-conserved/
about 2 months ago
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Thereâs something about Symmetry⊠Physicists talk a lot about symmetry. Listen to an article about string theory and you might get the idea that symmetry is some sort of mysterious, mystical principle of beauty, inexplicable to the common man or woman. Well, if it was inexplicable, I wouldnât beâŠ
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Thereâs something about SymmetryâŠ
Physicists talk a lot about symmetry. Listen to an article about string theory and you might get the idea that symmetry is some sort of mysterious, mystical principle of beauty, inexplicable to the common man or woman. Well, if it was inexplicable, I wouldnât be blogging about it, now would I? Symmetry in physics is dead simple. At the same time, itâs a bit misleading.
http://4gravitons.com/2013/04/19/theres-something-about-symmetry/
2 months ago
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In which I have some opinions about exam accommodations:
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Ideally, Exams Are for the Students
I should preface this by saying I don't actually know that much about education. I taught a bit in my previous life as a professor, yes, but I probably spent more time being taught how to teach than actually teaching. Recently, the Atlantic had a piece about testing accommodations for university students, like extra time on exams, or getting to do an exam in a special distraction-free environment.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/12/05/ideally-exams-are-for-the-students/
2 months ago
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Some bonus info for my Quanta piece last week:
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Bonus Info For âCosmic Paradox Reveals the Awful Consequence of an Observer-Free Universeâ
I had a piece in Quanta Magazine recently, about a tricky paradox that's puzzling quantum gravity researchers and some early hints at its resolution. The paradox comes from trying to describe "closed universes", which are universes where it is impossible to reach the edge, even if you had infinite time to do it. This could be because the universe wraps around like a globe, or because the universe is expanding so fast no traveler could ever reach an edge.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/11/28/bonus-info-for-cosmic-paradox-reveals-the-awful-consequence-of-an-observer-free-universe/
2 months ago
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Why do all of those European scholars have teams with cutesy names? The answer may surprise you:
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Mandatory Dumb Acronyms
Sometimes, the world is silly for honest, happy reasons. And sometimes, it's silly for reasons you never even considered. Scientific projects often have acronyms, some of which are...clever, let's say. Astronomers are famous for acronyms. Read this list, and you can find examples from 2D-FRUTTI and ABRACADABRA to WOMBAT and YORIC. Some of these aren't even "really" acronyms, using letters other than the beginning of each word, multiple letters from a word, or both.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/11/21/mandatory-dumb-acronyms/
3 months ago
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reposted by
Sean Carroll
3 months ago
Is the universe bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside? I.e. does a universe contain essentially no global information, but appears to when looked at from internal subsystems? Love this stuff (and have been thinking about related questions). Don't think we have it sorted out quite yet.
add a skeleton here at some point
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I've got a new piece up in
@quantamagazine.bsky.social
, about a puzzle that is fascinating some folks in quantum gravity. Expect a "bonus info" post in a week or two with more info.
www.quantamagazine.org/cosmic-parad...
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Cosmic Paradox Reveals the Awful Consequence of an Observer-Free Universe | Quanta Magazine
Encouraged by successes in understanding black holes, theoretical physicists are applying what theyâve learned to whole universes. What theyâre finding has them questioning fundamental assumptions abo...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosmic-paradox-reveals-the-awful-consequence-of-an-observer-free-universe-20251119/
3 months ago
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In which I offer some unsolicited advice:
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Reminder to Physics Popularizers: âDiscoverâ Is a Technical Term
When a word has both an everyday meaning and a technical meaning, it can cause no end of confusion. I've written about this before using one of the most common examples, the word "model", which means something quite different in the phrases "large language model", "animal model for Alzheimer's" and "model train". And I've written about running into this kind of confusion at the beginning of my PhD, …
http://4gravitons.com/2025/11/14/reminder-to-physics-popularizers-discover-is-a-technical-term/
3 months ago
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If you're confused by a scientist, ask yourself: which register are they using?
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Explain/Teach/Advocate
Scientists have different goals when they communicate, leading to different styles, or registers, of communication. If you don't notice what register a scientist is using, you might think they're saying something they're not. And if you notice someone using the wrong register for a situation, they may not actually be a scientist. Sometimes, a scientist is trying to explain…
http://4gravitons.com/2025/11/07/explain-teach-advocate/
3 months ago
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For this Halloween, are you afraid of the dark?
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Fear of the Dark, Physics Version
Happy Halloween! I've got a yearly tradition on this blog of talking about the spooky side of physics. This year, we'll think about what happens...when you turn off the lights. Over history, astronomy has given us larger and larger views of the universe. We started out thinking the planets, Sun, and Moon were human-like, just a short distance away. Measuring distances, we started to understand the size of the Earth, then the Sun, then realized how much farther still the stars were from us.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/10/31/fear-of-the-dark-physics-version/
3 months ago
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I have a book review in Science this month, of
@danielwhiteson.bsky.social
and Andy Warner's fun new book, "Do Aliens Speak Physics?" Link here, it's paywalled, but for a one-pager that just means it's a bit pixellated:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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Extraterrestrials illustrated
A physicist and a cartoonist join forces with an accessible guide to thinking about life in the cosmos
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeb1978
3 months ago
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C. N. Yang was a towering figure in physics. And not, for the most part, for his Nobel-winning work.
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C. N. Yang, Dead at 103
I don't usually do obituaries here, but sometimes I have something worth saying. Chen Ning Yang, a towering figure in particle physics, died last week. Picture from 1957, when he received his Nobel I never met him. By the time I started my PhD at Stony Brook, Yang was long-retired, and hadn't visited the Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics…
http://4gravitons.com/2025/10/24/c-n-yang-dead-at-103/
4 months ago
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reposted by
Patrick Koppenburg đ§
4 months ago
Welcome to @CERN, Ireland.
add a skeleton here at some point
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AGI can be both scientific nonsense and a plausible technological goal.
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AGI Is an Economic Term, Not a Computer Science Term
I ran into this Bluesky post, and while a lot of the argument resonated with me, I think the author is missing something important. Shannon Vallor is a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh. She spoke recently at a meeting honoring the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test. The core of her argument, recapped in the Bluesky post, is that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, represents an outdated scientific concept, like phlogiston.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/10/17/agi-is-an-economic-term-not-a-computer-science-term/
4 months ago
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Congratulations to this year's Physics Nobel laureates!
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Congratulations to John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis!
The 2025 Physics Nobel Prize was announced this week, awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis for building an electrical circuit that exhibited quantum effects like tunneling and energy quantization on a macroscopic scale. Press coverage of this prize tends to focus on two aspects: the idea that these three "scaled up" quantum effects to medium-sized objects (the…
http://4gravitons.com/2025/10/10/congratulations-to-john-clarke-michel-devoret-and-john-martinis/
4 months ago
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If you've got a theory, you don't just have to test it. You have to make sure it agrees with past tests, too.
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When Your Theory Is Already Dead
Occasionally, people try to give "even-handed" accounts of crackpot physics, like people who claim to have invented anti-gravity devices. These accounts don't go so far as to say that the crackpots are right, and will freely point out plausible doubts about the experiments. But at the end of the day, they'll conclude that we still don't really know the answer, and perhaps the next experiment will go differently.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/10/03/when-your-theory-is-already-dead/
4 months ago
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I suspect academic cheating is more complicated than people think. Anyone know of any good studies?
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Requests for an Ethnography of Cheating
What is AI doing to higher education? And what, if anything, should be done about it? Chad Orzel at Counting Atoms had a post on this recently, tying the question to a broader point. There is a fundamental tension in universities, between actual teaching and learning and credentials. A student who just wants the piece of paper at the end has no reason not to cheat if they can get away with it, so the easier it becomes to get away with cheating (say, by using AI), the less meaningful the credential gets.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/09/26/requests-for-an-ethnography-of-cheating/
5 months ago
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Something bugging me about recent black hole coverage:
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To Measure Something or to Test It
Black holes have been in the news a couple times recently. On one end, there was the observation of an extremely large black hole in the early universe, when no black holes of the kind were expected to exist. My understanding is this is very much a "big if true" kind of claim, something that could have dramatic implications but may just be being misunderstood.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/09/19/to-measure-something-or-to-test-it/
5 months ago
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It's not just a cognitive bias
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What Youâre Actually Scared of in Impostor Syndrome
Academics tend to face a lot of impostor syndrome. Something about a job with no clear criteria for success, where you could always in principle do better and you mostly only see the cleaned-up, idealized version of others' work, is a recipe for driving people utterly insane with fear. The way most of us talk about that fear, it can seem like a cognitive bias, like a failure of epistemology.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/09/12/what-youre-actually-scared-of-in-impostor-syndrome/
5 months ago
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It's been a while since the era you could uncover the laws of the universe by tinkering with rocks.
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The Rocks in the Ground Era of Fundamental Physics
It's no secret that the early twentieth century was a great time to make progress in fundamental physics. On one level, it was an era when huge swaths of our understanding of the world were being rewritten, with relativity and quantum mechanics just being explored. It was a time when a bright student could guide the emergence of whole new branches of scholarship…
http://4gravitons.com/2025/09/05/the-rocks-in-the-ground-era-of-fundamental-physics/
5 months ago
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Scientific fraud is a serious problem. It's also more than one thing, and conflating the two makes science appear much less trustworthy than it actually is.
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Two Types of Scientific Fraud: for a Fee and for Power
A paper about scientific fraud has been making the rounds in social media lately. The authors gather evidence of large-scale networks of fraudsters across multiple fields, from teams of editors that fast-track fraudulent research to businesses that take over journals, sell spots for articles, and then move on to a new target when the journal is de-indexed. I'm not an expert in this kind of statistical sleuthing, but the work looks impressively thorough.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/08/29/two-types-of-scientific-fraud-for-a-fee-and-for-power/
5 months ago
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reposted by
Quanta Magazine
6 months ago
Hundreds of signals from colliding black holes over the past decade show that if black holes are sporting quantum âhair," it must be very short.
@4gravitons.bsky.social
reports:
www.quantamagazine.org/astrophysici...
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Astrophysicists Find No âHairâ on Black Holes | Quanta Magazine
According to Einsteinâs theory of gravity, black holes have only a small handful of distinguishing characteristics. Quantum theory implies they may have more. Now an experimental search finds that any...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/astrophysicists-find-no-hair-on-black-holes-20250827/
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Some bad, but hopefully interesting, ideas to improve AI:
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Some Dumb AIÂ Ideas
Sometimes, when I write a post about AI, I've been sitting on an idea for a long time. I've talked to experts, I've tried to understand the math, I've honed my points and cleared away clutter. This is not one of those times. The ideas in this post almost certainly have something deeply wrong with them. But hopefully they're interesting food for thought.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/08/22/some-dumb-ai-ideas/
6 months ago
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GPS satellites test general relativity constantly. But we need other tests too:
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Technology as Evidence
How much can you trust general relativity? On the one hand, you can read through a lovely Wikipedia article full of tests, explaining just how far and how precisely scientists have pushed their knowledge of space and time. On the other hand, you can trust GPS satellites. As many of you may know, GPS wouldn't work if we didn't know about general relativity.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/08/15/technology-as-evidence/
6 months ago
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reposted by
Philip Ball
6 months ago
Heisenberg on Bohr's occasionally excesssively generous nature. One of the first lessons learnt as a Nature editor about the "fringe" submissions is that this is exactly what will happen if you let it.
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By definition, journalists try to only cover news that is newsworthy. What does that mean for science journalism?
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Newsworthiness Bias
I had a chat about journalism recently, and I had a realization about just how weird science journalism, in particular, is. Journalists arenât supposed to be cheerleaders. Journalism and PR have very different goals (which is why I keep those sides of my work separate). A journalist is supposed to be uncompromising, to write the truth even if it paints the source in a bad light.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/08/08/newsworthiness-bias/
6 months ago
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For those interested in more detail after reading my piece on fermions and bosons, here's a little light topology
add a skeleton here at some point
6 months ago
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Did Einstein do "vibe physics"? Kind of, but not the way you're trying to.
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Microdosing Vibe Physics
Have you heard of "vibe physics"? The phrase "vibe coding" came first. People have been using large language models like ChatGPT to write computer code (and not the way I did last year). They chat with the model, describing what they want to do and asking the model to code it up. You can guess the arguments around this, from people who are convinced AI is already better than a human programmer to people sure the code will be riddled with errors and vulnerabilities.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/08/01/microdosing-vibe-physics/
6 months ago
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reposted by
Opal
7 months ago
With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.
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reposted by
Ben Brubaker
7 months ago
Missed opportunity for a perfect headline: "I believe that Claude believes in God"
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Claude Finds GodâAsterisk
â»[Perfect stillness]â»
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/claude-finds-god
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There is a type of theory that isn't meant to be tested. How do physicists evaluate them?
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Value in Formal Theory Land
What makes a physics theory valuable? You may think that a theory's job is to describe reality, to be true. If that's the goal, we have a whole toolbox of ways to assess its value. We can check if it makes predictions and if those predictions are confirmed. We can assess whether the theory can cheat to avoid the consequences of its predictions (falsifiability) and whether its complexity is justified by the evidence (Occam's razor, and statistical methods that follow from it).
http://4gravitons.com/2025/07/25/value-in-formal-theory-land/
7 months ago
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We all hate hype. But it's not as easy to define as you'd think:
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Hype, Incentives, and Culture
To be clear, hype isn't just lying. We have a word for when someone lies to convince someone else to pay them, and that word is fraud. Most of what we call hype doesn't reach that bar. Instead, hype lives in a gray zone of affect and metaphor. Some hype is pure affect. It's about the subjective details, it's about mood.
http://4gravitons.com/2025/07/18/hype-incentives-and-culture/
7 months ago
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reposted by
Daniel Green
7 months ago
In fact, the reason the SPT result is lower than previous ones is that they use a different value for the optical depth (there are multiple values that come from Planck that are just slightly different ways of analyzing the low-ell data). The SPT data isnât actually driving this.
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reposted by
Daniel Green
7 months ago
The really critical point is that âmore dataâ is not a solution. Because of the peculiar nature of the neutrino mass measurement, it is limited by measurements that will be very difficult to repeat and may not happen again for 15 years
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