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Data Comes From Papers
There’s a lovely resource that I suspect most non-physicists don’t know about. It’s called the Particle Data Group, and its interactive site PDGLive. If you want to know the most up-to-date...
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Everybody Who Isn’t ”Viewers Like You”
Last week, I talked about how truthseekers get paid. But truth-tellers and truth-seekers are different things. Consider educational kids’ shows on public television. Nobody who works on Sesame Street...
View ArticlePaying the Truthseekers
Academics and journalists have a lot in common, at least in principle. Whether you’re a reporter or a professor, your job is to go out into the world and figure out the truth. You’re supposed to be...
View ArticleDon’t Judge an Explanation by Its Cover
Dark matter bugs people. I’ve talked before about why, and why it, and other beyond-the-standard-model proposals like those inspired by MOND, are nonetheless credible with physicists. But beyond the...
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Newsworthiness Guide for Scientists
I had a recurring “elevator pitch” at Lancefest earlier this summer. After explaining that I’m a science journalist now, I’d end with “so if you run into a story, let me know!” One person had a...
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Better Bounds
I swear this isn’t turning into an AI blog. But did you see the one about the Riemann hypothesis? Someone at Anthropic did something I’m sure they’re all tempted to do, and tried to use an internal...
View ArticleIt Only Counts When AI Gets to My Field
It’s a meme at this point. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov, Go players could say that their game, unlike Chess, was too complex to fall to a computer program. Then AlphaGo showed they were wrong. It just...
View ArticleBonus Info on Dark Energy and Muons
I had two pieces up this month, one in New Scientist and one in Quanta. I figured I’d give a bit of “bonus info” for both here. The New Scientist piece covered a paper arguing that, according to the...
View ArticleQuantum Apologetics and Quantum Theology
As an atheist, I started out frustrated by how little interest religious people had in debating their beliefs. Much of that was probably to do with how obnoxious it was to be “debated” by a socially...
View ArticleIn Defense of Reductionist Chauvinism
I don’t think people who argue about reductionism are really arguing about reductionism. Reductionism is the idea that the behavior of big, complicated things (people, economies, ecosystems) boils...
View ArticleAmplitudes 2026, Part II
This is a continuation of my conference coverage from last week. The same warnings apply: this is much more technical than my usual posts, readers beware! Last week I covered the talks from Monday...
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Amplitudes 2026
This week was Amplitudes, my old subfield’s big yearly conference. This year, it’s at Queen Mary University of London. I’m too busy to attend these days, now that nobody is paying me a salary to do...
View ArticleAt Lancefest
It’s been a while since I’ve said this: I’m at a conference this week! Specifically, I’m at Lancefest, which is not just any old conference, but a birthday conference for Lance Dixon. When a renowned...
View ArticleRadiation Radiates
I recently finished reading The Orphan Master’s Son, a (Pulitzer-winning, apparently) novel set in 2000’s-era North Korea. In one plot point, Kim Jong Il has agents steal a Japanese telescope designed...
View ArticleAn AI Opinions Chart
You ever read something and suddenly a whole classification scheme lights up in your head? A thread on X from “stringking42069” showed me a combination of opinions I hadn’t seen before....
View ArticleShould You Read What You Cite? That Depends
When arXiv announced it would ban people for hallucinated citations, that is citations of papers that don’t exist, the discussion online got sidetracked by the question of whether academics actually...
View ArticleDoing Things Well Is an International Activity
In the US, funding agencies seem to be increasingly opposed to an often inevitable feature of good science: international collaboration. Scientists have been told by officials at the National...
View ArticleArXiv Will Ban You for Hallucinated References
Thomas Dietterich, Chair of the Computer Science section of the preprint server arXiv.org, recently clarified the site’s policies towards “hallucinated” citations and other signs of careless use of AI...
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Make No Mistakes
I’m taking a Danish exam next week, and it’s a big one, a culmination of years learning the language. My classmates are stressed. Despite how much we’ve learned, it feels like we’re always making...
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Bonus Info for “100-year-old assumption about the universe may soon be...
I had a piece up in New Scientist last week (paywalled, sorry!), about a new analysis that suggests the universe is less homogeneous (more “lumpy”) that most cosmologists believe. The piece was a bit...
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