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

The South Pole Telescope did not just rule out massive neutrinos. But here's why it might look that way:

Some bonus info for my (three!) pieces last week:

I have a piece with Physics Today, about discussions over CERN's next big collider project: pubs.aip.org/physicstoday...

Did you see the muon headlines? What actually changed?

I had a piece a couple days ago in Ars Technica, about a young researcher's quest to change how the LHC analyzes data:

I have a new short "explainer" piece with @quantamagazine.bsky.social , on two words you can hear physicists use for...well, pretty much everything.

Well this is f’in sad #ASMicrobe

Amplitudes 2025 was this week, and I've been skimming slides in my free time. Here's the highlights:

I have another piece up with FirstPrinciples! For this one, I interviewed the president of the Sloan Foundation, one of the US's most prestigious foundations that funds scientific research. www.firstprinciples.org/article/how-...

Some bonus details for my two pieces last month:

Laypeople often learn about science from expert explanations & those explanations often contain JARGON. Does jargon make explanations better or worse? In a paper out today in Nature Human Behaviour, @cruzf.bsky.social and I find that jargon can support illusions of understanding...

This week I started on a new type of science writing work: communications consulting.

Postscript: David Chalmers organized a poll, by which we have established that not all Philosophy is Natural. I always suspected that some philosophy is Unnatural.

I had a piece up last week in Scientific American! A few bonus details in this post:

And another piece this week! This one in @quantamagazine.bsky.social , about a counterintuitive approach to computing: www.quantamagazine.org/how-can-ai-r...

I have another piece out with FirstPrinciples! This was a fun one, about the math behind some classic science fiction concepts: www.firstprinciples.org/article/engi...

I had a piece in Scientific American last week! Paywalled FYI, but it should be in the upcoming print issue as well. I'll have a blog post on it on Friday. www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

SciPost is a weird, imperiled creature. One that could save scientists a lot of money if it lives.

Here's a succinct illustration of point (A). Surely any large text corpus contains more instances of "blithering idiot" than "blithering "Blithering"!"

A bit about my article this week for FirstPrinciples.org:

I have another piece out with FirstPrinciples! This one's an explainer about an influential idea in quantum gravity: www.firstprinciples.org/article/the-...

There's still time, I'd be happy to hear from more voices!

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Particle Physicist: No, and that’s why this is such an exciting time for the field! Just as a coin balanced perfectly on its edge must have a very good explanation, so this gap, or "desert" if you will...

Any graduate student will testify that science doesn’t stop just because the government has illegally kidnapped you.

Should we still be talking about "scientific consensus"? Or is that even the right question?

What a day to have studied Latin in Chicago.

At a rate of 89000 gold nuclei per second it takes 10 million years to collect one dollar worth of gold.

If you're an experimental particle physicist in Europe, I want to hear from you! I'm writing for Physics Today about the European Strategy for Particle Physics Update. I'm looking to know how the community feels. What excites you? What worries you? FCC-ee or linear collider? Muons?