Awful for academics but great news for Borges fans

Karmela's ability to weave threads from physics, culture, and society together into original insights always astounds me. Looking forward to this.

New on arxiv: a group from IBM claim a new record for the largest GHZ state, of 120 qubits* arxiv.org/abs/2510.09520 * terms and conditions (postselection) apply

🧪 New blog post: What makes quantum physics special (or "strange" or "weird")? I take a whirlwind tour through 80 years of attempts to pinpoint the answer, from early thought experiments to recent developments inspired by thinking about quantum computers. wmorong.github.io/wills-blog/b...

PSA to scientists: Google calculator appears to no longer do basic unit conversion correctly! n.b. the correct answer here is 223.4 Myr, a factor of about 60 larger than Google's answer. 🔭 🧪

Why do quantum computers work? Although it's missing some modern developments, I think this twenty-year old (!) article from Steane is still provocative. His answer: entanglement allows them to avoid representing unnecessary intermediate results in some calculations. arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph...

Some thoughts on the influence of the late Dan Kleppner and Norman Ramsey on the culture of AMO physics: open.substack.com/pub/chadorze...

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...

Can't stop thinking about these lovely pictures of atoms doing their thing from the Zwierlein group. Left: bosons condensing into a Bose-Einstein condensate. Center: fermions avoiding each other. Right: molecules paired up.

One of the finest explainers of quantum physics for the public is, for now, a victim of political suppression. @mattstrassler.bsky.social profmattstrassler.com/2025/04/17/b...

To be clear, one of my major grants is among the 75 stop work orders sent to Cornell yesterday. This means that, as of yesterday, we are not allowed to spend on this grant. The grant funds the work of several graduate students, all of whom are extremely dedicated & doing outstanding research

🧪⚛️. This is self-defeating and objectively bad for the country and beyond. www.npr.org/2025/03/26/n...

This is a super cool story: a problem from quantum physics led to pure math research that led to better bulbs.

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH

I've seen it happen more times that I can count: a physics press release announces the discovery of a "new phase of matter", and the public interprets this as being a bigger deal than it really is. So, I made a short blog post to explain what this actually means: wmorong.github.io/wills-blog/b...

I doubt that anyone following me needs to be convinced of the importance of basic research, but the details here are fun and fascinating.

Inspired by this post, I'm curious if anyone has suggestions for especially well-written papers. Here's one I stumbled on recently, on a subject I know almost nothing about, and really enjoyed: arxiv.org/abs/1903.12621

I have a soft spot for textbooks that present some aspect of physics in an ideosyncratic or unconventional way. Any I should add?