Lots of debate over this Kaplan quote. I think even if we trusted him on the tech, he's missing the social factors.

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!

What shapes academia's population pyramid?

Learn to separate what you were taught for school from what you were taught about the world:

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!

@chive.pub does answer part of this question, thanks! Will be interesting seeing what that ends up looking like.

Blatant self-promotion, or a new approach to academic publishing?

Lots of discussion lately about whether physics has been making progress. Has medicine?

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

Anyone have any idea why this is happening?

CERN just got a Newtonmas gift. We'll see what comes of it.

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.

I hope your gift unboxing went well! 🎁

Do LLMs obscure provenance in academic writing? Probably. Do academics even track provenance in the first place, though?

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... 🧪⚛️

Wondering what energy is? Energy is conserved.

There’s 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 wouldn’t be…

In which I have some opinions about exam accommodations:

Some bonus info for my Quanta piece last week:

Why do all of those European scholars have teams with cutesy names? The answer may surprise you:

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.

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...

In which I offer some unsolicited advice:

If you're confused by a scientist, ask yourself: which register are they using?

For this Halloween, are you afraid of the dark?

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/...

C. N. Yang was a towering figure in physics. And not, for the most part, for his Nobel-winning work.

Welcome to @CERN, Ireland.

AGI can be both scientific nonsense and a plausible technological goal.

Congratulations to this year's Physics Nobel laureates!

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.

I suspect academic cheating is more complicated than people think. Anyone know of any good studies?

Something bugging me about recent black hole coverage:

It's not just a cognitive bias

It's been a while since the era you could uncover the laws of the universe by tinkering with rocks.

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.

Hundreds of signals from colliding black holes over the past decade show that if black holes are sporting quantum “hair," it must be very short. @4gravitons.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/astrophysici...

Some bad, but hopefully interesting, ideas to improve AI:

GPS satellites test general relativity constantly. But we need other tests too:

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.

By definition, journalists try to only cover news that is newsworthy. What does that mean for science journalism?

For those interested in more detail after reading my piece on fermions and bosons, here's a little light topology

Did Einstein do "vibe physics"? Kind of, but not the way you're trying to.

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.

Missed opportunity for a perfect headline: "I believe that Claude believes in God"

There is a type of theory that isn't meant to be tested. How do physicists evaluate them?

We all hate hype. But it's not as easy to define as you'd think:

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 isn’t actually driving this.

The really critical point is that “more data” 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