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. 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 in quite some time. […]| 4 gravitons
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 o…| 4 gravitons
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 […]| 4 gravitons
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 […]| 4 gravitons
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 fun…| 4 gravitons
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 […]| 4 gravitons
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, id…| 4 gravitons
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 […]| 4 gravitons
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 tha…| 4 gravitons
When describing graduate school before, I compared it to an apprenticeship. (I expanded on that analogy more here.) Let’s keep pursuing that analogy. If a graduate student is like an apprentice, th…| 4 gravitons
In these times, I’m unusually lucky. I’m a theoretical physicist. I don’t handle goods, or see customers. Other scientists need labs, or telescopes: I just need a computer and a p…| 4 gravitons
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 […]| 4 gravitons
I had a chat about journalism recently, and I had a realization about just how weird science journalism, in particular, is. Journalists aren’t supposed to be cheerleaders. Journalism and PR have ve…| 4 gravitons
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 c…| 4 gravitons
Worldwide, only about one in thirty people live in a different country from where they were born. Wander onto a university campus, though, and you may get a different impression. The bigger the uni…| 4 gravitons
For over a decade, I studied scattering amplitudes, the formulas particle physicists use to find the probability that particles collide, or scatter, in different ways. I went to Amplitudes, the fie…| 4 gravitons
Apologies to anyone who finds the title too flippant. This is a serious situation, and I am taking it seriously. But this is how I write. I mix the absurd and the profound. I build stories. In May,…| 4 gravitons
