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Neu-tree-no Detector
I’ve written before about physicists’ ideas for gigantic particle accelerators, proposals for machines far bigger than the Large Hadron Collider or even plans for a Future Circular Collider. The ideas...
View ArticleValentine’s Day Physics Poem 2024
It’s that time of year again! In one of this blog’s yearly traditions, I’m posting a poem mixing physics and romance. For those who’d like to see more, you can find past years’ poems here. Modeling...
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Book Review: The Case Against Reality
Nima Arkani-Hamed shows up surprisingly rarely in popular science books. A major figure in my former field, Nima is extremely quotable (frequent examples include “spacetime is doomed” and “the...
View ArticleFrance for Non-EU Spouses of EU Citizens: To Get Your Rights, Don’t Follow...
I’m a German citizen, my wife is not. When we moved to France, we were confused. Looking at the French government’s website, we couldn’t figure out a crucial question: when, and how, would she have...
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What Are Particles? The Gentle Introduction
On this blog, I write about particle physics for the general public. I try to make things as simple as possible, but I do have to assume some things. In particular, I usually assume you know what...
View ArticleAn “Open-Source” Grant Proposal
Back in the Fall, I spent most of my time writing a grant proposal. In Europe, getting a European Research Council (ERC) grant is how you know you’ve made it as a researcher. Covering both science and...
View ArticleHow Subfields Grow
A commenter recently asked me about the different “tribes” in my sub-field. I’ve been working in an area called “amplitudeology”, where we try to find more efficient ways to make predictions...
View ArticleGeneralizing a Black Box Theory
In physics and in machine learning, we have different ways of thinking about models. A model in physics, like the Standard Model, is a tool to make predictions. Using statistics and a whole lot of...
View ArticleMaking More Nails
They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Academics are a bit smarter than that. Confidently predict a world of nails, and you fall to the first paper that shows evidence...
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The Hidden Higgs
Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist whose name graces the Higgs boson, died this week. Peter Higgs, after the Higgs boson discovery was confirmed This post isn’t an obituary: you can find plenty of...
View ArticleNo Unmoved Movers
Economists must find academics confusing. When investors put money in a company, they have some control over what that company does. They vote to decide a board, and the board votes to hire a CEO. If...
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The Quantum Paths Not Traveled
Before this week’s post: a former colleague of mine from CEA Paris-Saclay, Sylvain Ribault, posted a dialogue last week presenting different perspectives on academic publishing. One of the highlights...
View ArticlePeer Review in Post-scarcity Academia
I posted a link last week to a dialogue written by a former colleague of mine, Sylvain Ribault. Sylvain’s dialogue is a summary of different perspectives on academic publishing. Unlike certain more...
View ArticleGetting It Right vs Getting It Done
With all the hype around machine learning, I occasionally get asked if it could be used to make predictions for particle colliders, like the LHC. Physicists do use machine learning these days, to be...
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The Impact of Jim Simons
The obituaries have been weirdly relevant lately. First, a couple weeks back, Daniel Dennett died. Dennett was someone who could have had a huge impact on my life. Growing up combatively atheist in...
View ArticleAt Quanta This Week, and Some Bonus Material
When I moved back to Denmark, I mentioned that I was planning to do more science journalism work. The first fruit of that plan is up this week: I have a piece at Quanta Magazine about a perennially...
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Does Science Require Publication?
Seen on Twitter: As is traditional, twitter erupted into dumb arguments over this. Some made fun of Yann LeCun for implying that Elon Musk will be forgotten, which despite any other faults of his...
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Gravity-Defying Theories
Universal gravitation was arguably Newton’s greatest discovery. Newton realized that the same laws could describe the orbits of the planets and the fall of objects on Earth, that bodies like the Moon...
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(Not At) Amplitudes 2024 at the IAS
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...
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Beyond Elliptic Polylogarithms in Oaxaca
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 organize a...
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