Can’t open windows in space!

POET: And, like a dying lady lean and pale, Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil, Out of her chamber, led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,The moon arose up in the murky east, A white and shapeless mass. OTHER ASTRONAUTS: [screaming] they should have sent a pilot

Physicists of Bluesky! I'm writing a piece for @quantamagazine.bsky.social : "What is Mass?" a collection of different perspectives on mass in physics, in the vein of Natalie Wolchover's "What is a Particle?" piece a few years back. If you've got a cool perspective to share, send me a message!

Scientists trust what they can verify. Journalists have to trust differently.

If you see a physics paper crammed into six pages of two-column text, here's why:

Went back to Twitter to check something and @deontologistics.bsky.social reminded me of this meme, I genuinely think the best meme to ever be produced by Philosophy Twitter.

A few people have asked me about this paper. This is a long piece, but probably not all you were looking for.

I've been reminded more than once recently of something I think should be part of a start-of-career scientist's training: If you find yourself in disagreement with another school of thought, your job is not to write papers showing why the adherents of that school are all benighted fools. Rather...

In which everyone is wrong about teaching:

A new paper on falling cat science came out and I just have to draw people's attention to this image

Could we mechanize scientific creativity? Not with these papers!

Pointy at one end - the painful sharp end when you first start reading it - and rounded at the other - the pleasant end when you've learned the material and are wanting to review it or look up precise details.

A prose take on last week's topic:

advice from Dirac for whoever needs it

This year's traditional Valentine's Day Physics Poem:

Found an additional graphic that gets even more of these quotes together. I've kept "I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees" pinned above my desk since I first started studying evolutionary biology as an undergraduate. So relatable to get extremely frustrated with your study system.

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: