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
How much can you trust general relativity? On the one hand, you can read through a lovely Wikipedia article full of tests, explaining just how far and how precisely scientists have pushed their knowledge of space and time. On the other hand, you can trust GPS satellites. As many of you may know, GPS wouldn’t […]| 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
Have you heard of “vibe physics”? The phrase “vibe coding” came first. People have been using large language models like ChatGPT to write computer code (and not the way I did last year). They chat with the model, describing what they want to do and asking the model to code it up. You can guess […]| 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
To be clear, hype isn’t just lying. We have a word for when someone lies to convince someone else to pay them, and that word is fraud. Most of what we call hype doesn’t reach that bar. Instead, hype lives in a gray zone of affect and metaphor. Some hype is pure affect. It’s about […]| 4 gravitons
Recently, the South Pole Telescope’s SPT-3G collaboration released new measurements of the cosmic microwave background, the leftover light from the formation of the first atoms. By measuring …| 4 gravitons
Three of my science journalism pieces went up last week! (This is a total coincidence. One piece was a general explainer “held in reserve” for a nice slot in the schedule, one was a piece I drafted in February, while the third I worked on in May. In journalism, things take as long as they […]| 4 gravitons
You may have heard that the muon g-2 problem has been solved. Muons are electrons’ heavier cousins. As spinning charged particles, they are magnetic, the strength of that magnetism characterized by a number denoted “g”. If you were to guess this number from classical physics alone, you’d conclude it should be 2, but quantum mechanics […]| 4 gravitons
Summer is conference season for academics, and this week held my old sub-field’s big yearly conference, called Amplitudes. This year, it was in Seoul at Seoul National University, the first t…| 4 gravitons
In January, my time at the Niels Bohr Institute ended. Instead of supporting myself by doing science, as I’d done the last thirteen or so years, I started making a living by writing, doing sc…| 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
I’ve got a piece out this week in a new venue: FirstPrinciples.org, where I’ve written a profile of a startup called Vaire Computing. Vaire works on reversible computing, an idea that t…| 4 gravitons
Arguably my biggest project over the last two years wasn’t a scientific paper, a journalistic article, or even a grant application. It was a conference. Most of the time, when scientists orga…| 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
