# shih (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 1 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover shih. Page: Feed: --- ## [The Dumbest Thing I've Read This Week II: Space Mirrors](http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2026/5/10/the-dumbest-thing-ive-read-this-week-ii-space-mirrors) _2026-05-11 · Matthew Buckley · PhysicsMatt's Blog - physicsmatt_ Mirrors in space are a dumb idea. Put that aside for a second. I want to talk about math, and how physicists use math. And why you need to be better at using math as part of your thought process. It's going to touch on some AI stuff, and I want to get across why you need to be more mathematically literate even with all these new tools. Because math and sciences are liberal arts, no less than… ## [Paper Explainer: ClearPotential: Revealing Local Dark Matter in Three Dimensions](http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2025/12/11/paper-explainer-clearpotential-revealing-local-dark-matter-in-three-dimensions) _2025-12-12 · Matthew Buckley · PhysicsMatt's Blog - physicsmatt_ This is a paper explainer for my recent work with my graduate student Eric Putney, previous Rutgers postdoc (now at Institute of Basic Science in Korea), and my Rutgers colleague David Shih. This is the culmination of a series of papers, which I’ve written about here. The goal of this paper and the larger project is to use the collective motion of the stars near the Earth, as measured by the Gaia… ## [The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week](http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2025/12/11/the-dumbest-thing-ive-seen-this-week) _2025-12-12 · Matthew Buckley · PhysicsMatt's Blog - physicsmatt_ Given that it is 2025, the dumbest thing I’ve seen this week is some stiff competition, but “AI datacenters in space” is some impressive idiocy. I’ve seen a few breathless media reports on how AI companies are planning to launch entire datacenters into space. Some of these articles point to a single H100 GPU that was used to train a LLM while in orbit. Obviously, humanity has the capacity to… ## [Paper Explainer: General Constraints on Isocurvature from the CMB and Ly-alpha Forest](http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2025/3/3/paper-explainer-general-constraints-on-isocurvature-from-the-cmb-and-ly-alpha-forest) _2025-03-04 · Matthew Buckley · PhysicsMatt's Blog - physicsmatt_ This is a paper explainer for my recent paper “General Constraints on Isocurvature from the CMB and Ly-$\\alpha$ Forest” by myself, Peizhi Du (Rutgers postdoc until recently, now a newly-minted faculty member in China), Nicolas Fernandez (Rutgers postdoc), and my student Mitchell Weikert. This is in some ways a follow up to our previous paper which I wrote about here That paper had to do with a new… ## [New Jersey Scholars' Letter on the Threats to Higher Education](http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2025/2/24/new-jersey-scholars-letter-on-the-threats-to-higher-education) _2025-02-24 · Matthew Buckley · PhysicsMatt's Blog - physicsmatt_ Today, along with about 230 other academics from New Jersey universities, both public and private, I sent a letter to the Senators of New Jersey (Andy Kim and Cory Booker) about the threats to scientific research and higher education that are occurring within the state and the nation as a whole. You can read that letter here . Academia has been facing problems and issues for a long time. Chief… ## [Paper Explainer: Mapping Dark Matter Through the Dust of the Milky Way Part I](http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2024/12/20/paper-explainer-mapping-dark-matter-through-the-dust-of-the-milky-way-part-i) _2024-12-20 · Matthew Buckley · PhysicsMatt's Blog - physicsmatt_ This is work that I did with my student, Eric Putney, then-Rutgers-postdoc Sung Hak Lim (now at the Institute for Basic Science in Daejeon), and my colleague David Shih. This is actually a continuation of work we’ve been doing for a while, starting with a paper that tested the idea on synthetic data, and then a later paper applying it to real data. I didn’t write blog posts on those because I fell… ## [Paper Explainer: Inferring the Morphology of the Galactic Center Excess with Gaussian Processes](http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2024/10/29/paper-explainer-inferring-the-morphology-of-the-galactic-center-excess-with-gaussian-processes) _2024-10-30 · Matthew Buckley · PhysicsMatt's Blog - physicsmatt_ This is a paper I wrote with Tracy Slatyer at MIT, her student Yitian Sun (now a postdoc in McGill), Sidd Mishra-Sharma (previously a postdoc at IAIFI, newly hired as a professor at Boston University), and my student Ed Ramirez. I think it is fair to say Ed did the majority of the analysis and coding on this (quite extensive) project, and was instrumental to the project from beginning to end..… ## [Paper Explainer: Force-feeding Supermassive Black Holes with Dissipative Dark Matter](http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2024/10/8/paper-explainer-force-feeding-supermassive-black-holes-with-dissipative-dark-matter) _2024-10-10 · Matthew Buckley · PhysicsMatt's Blog - physicsmatt_ There is a problem in the early Universe, one that demands an answer. Or maybe there isn’t. But at least, there is something weird going on in the data, and as a theorist, that’s good enough for me. JWST, our newest space telescope, is capable of peering back further into the history of the Universe than previously possible. Sensitive to the infrared (IR) wavelengths, it can see the earliest stars…