Stories about physics from someone who s been there
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 version of their Claude AI system to prove the most famous open conjecture in mathematics. It didn t work, [ ]
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 took a better approach. When AlphaFold leaped ahead of human experts in predicting how proteins fold, it was [ ]
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 supernova evidence, there is no need for dark energy, because the universe isn t speeding up after [ ]
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 awkward ten-year-old. But as I appreciate now, defending religious beliefs is just not a core activity for most religious [ ]
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 down to the behavior of their smallest constituents (molecules, atoms, subatomic particles). It s often contrasted with emergence, the idea that new rules emerge in those big, complicated [ ]
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 through Wednesday, so I ll jump right in here with Thursday morning, where the first speaker was Francesco Riva, who after a [ ]
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 that sort of thing. But it s still a good chance to keep up with the field, which helps me [ ]
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 academic turns 60 or so, their students and collaborators hold a birthday party-flavored conference for them. The conferences are usually [ ]
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 to measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, under the mistaken impression that it will help him find uranium. The novel plays it for (horrified) [ ]
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. stringking42069 is a pro-string theory commentator with a macho gym bro memer gimmick. He s openly contemptuous of many physicists who describe themselves as string [ ]