Columnist @QuantaMagazine. Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Kindness, integrity, dignity of all living things.
New York, New York
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📕Some personal news!📕
This will be my first book, an attempt to weave together the ideas and controversies of fundamental physics into a coherent narrative. Wish me luck!
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For a year I've been reporting this story about major climate news, finally breaking today: A new simulation finds that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. quantamagazine.org/cloud-los…
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How neat. Researchers claim to have found, at long last, an "einstein" tile - a shape that tiles the plane in a pattern that never repeats. First two authors appear to have no academic affiliations. arxiv.org/abs/2303.10798
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Physicists have used Google's quantum computer to send a signal through a wormhole, a shortcut in space-time first theorized by Einstein and Rosen in 1935. The landmark experiment was published today in Nature. Lots to say about it. Here's my deep dive: quantamagazine.org/physicist…
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Wow. The neuroscientist who was quoted praising Elizabeth Koch in the distressingly awful NYT profile receives funding from Koch. 👇 This was not disclosed.
Full disclosure: My lab has received grant funding from the Unlikely Collaborators Foundation. We're grateful for their support of cutting-edge neuroscience. 2/2 unlikelycollaborators.com/
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New: Google's quantum computing team in collaboration with physicists say they have demonstrated a genuine time crystal for the first time. I've been chasing this story for months now; the paper finally dropped yesterday evening. Read all about it: quantamagazine.org/first-tim…
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I wrote about a potentially major advance in the theoretical understanding of deep learning: quantamagazine.org/new-theor…
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I'm excited to tell the story of intriguing links between particle physics and peculiar numbers called octonions, and the physicist who has been finding them: quantamagazine.org/the-octon…
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I wrote about a major new proof that strengthens the case against the continuum hypothesis, Cantor's 1878 conjecture about how many real numbers exist. The proof raises hopes that mathematicians could return to the "prelapsarian world" before Gödel. quantamagazine.org/how-many-…
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I’m late with this, but geez, what a big decade the 2010s were for science. We got: the Higgs boson, CRISPR, gravitational waves, deep learning, quantum computers, 1000s of exoplanets, black hole photo. Looking at you, 2020s.
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A striking reminder of the fact that information gets scrambled, not destroyed
Luger et al. are back with another outrageously good paper. They show that if you can measure the star light reflected by an exoplanet to extreme precision over a long period, then you can map the surface! arxiv.org/abs/2103.06275
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Check out my color map of the numbers 1 through 324. The white square in the center = 1, the blue square = 2, & the numbers spiral out from there (an “Ulam spiral”). Squares representing primes have unique colors, other squares are divided into the colors of their prime factors.
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I wrote a rather metaphysical essay for @NewYorker about the structure of the laws of nature and what that structure implies about what an explanation of the universe might look like. Got that? newyorker.com/science/elemen…
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Everything in the universe reduces to elementary particles. So, I set out to address the question: What are particles? The reporting took me to the frontier of fundamental physics.
Before you read, would love to hear your best tweet-length definition!
quantamagazine.org/what-is-a…
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I wrote about some big new stuff happening in chaos theory: quantamagazine.org/machine-l…
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Discolored patches of wall or ground that look like shadows are often actually faint images of what's behind us or around a corner. Computer vision scientists have found ways of pulling these images out. My new story might give you the heebie-jeebies: quantamagazine.org/the-new-s…
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JWST's sunshield is fully deployed!
The sunshield's deployment is what everyone involved in this mission was most nervous about, because you can't predict exactly how fabric will move—especially not in zero-G. But it's open! It's taut! By golly, this telescope might just work!
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Hi! Just hopping on to say I won’t be posting much these next several weeks, because my wife gave birth to our adorable daughter Arden. World’s greatest science experiment going on over here.
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BREAKING: The Standard Model of particle physics (maybe) quantamagazine.org/fermilab-…
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New by me: I attempt to explain how Kurt Gödel proved his infamous incompleteness theorems. Cool art by @NatureInTheory. quantamagazine.org/how-godel…
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Reading physics papers is hard not because of the scary equations or heady concepts but because of the unclear antecedents and missing commas
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I wrote about a possible connection between the fabric of space-time and the way information is encoded in quantum computers. If you could read this non-cakewalk, I'd be grateful: quantamagazine.org/how-space…
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Stephen Hawking had a vision that the universe expanded out of a dimensionless point, rather like a shuttlecock. Recently, his stunning proposal has come under attack, but a vigorous defense has been mounted. Excited for people to read my new story. quantamagazine.org/physicist…
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The cost of pulling a tonne of CO2 out of the atmosphere now ranges between $94 and $232. (Humans emit 35 billion tonnes per year.) Governments could afford to pay $100 per tonne by adding a tax of $0.22 cents per liter of gasoline. It's getting viable. nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
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New story alert! The second-ever photo of a black hole, recently released by the Event Horizon Telescope team, solves the mystery of how black holes launch jets—those enormous, dead-straight beams of energy that shoot out from their edges. Thread... quantamagazine.org/physicist…
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Hey look at this! We've created a map of all the particles and forces of nature. Read about the map - which is based closely on the "double simplex" design conceived by particle physicist @chrisquigg - and explore it here: quantamagazine.org/a-new-map…
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Whoa! New black hole photo dropped.
"This image shows the polarised view of the black hole in M87. The lines mark the orientation of polarisation, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole."
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Good god. Rioters who “wanted to have a few words” with Chuck Schumer were given directions to Schumer’s office by a Capitol Police officer.
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I love them all erich-friedman.github.io/pac…
The optimal known packing of 17 equal squares into a larger square - i.e. the arrangement which minimises the size of the large square.
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Particle physicists are in crisis, having searched in vain for particles that would restore "naturalness" to their equations. Now, some think the failure of naturalness signals the breakdown of reductionism (i.e. big stuff is made of smaller stuff). New: quantamagazine.org/a-deepeni…
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Breaking news! XENON1T, the world's most sensitive dark matter experiment, has seen something. It could be a revolutionary new particle — or something much more mundane: quantamagazine.org/dark-matt…
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Several years ago, a physics student started wondering what a clock is. That set him and his coauthors on a path to a new understanding of timekeeping as a thermodynamic process with fundamental limits. What might it tell us about time itself? New by me: quantamagazine.org/the-new-s…
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“Transparency around scientific uncertainty is bad because the public is too stupid to understand” always backfires and is cynical and wrong. People followed the story of the LK-99 RTSC claim as if it was the Super Bowl because they are smart, not because they are stupid.
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I spoke with Edward Witten about physics, its relationship to math, Wheeler, it from qubit, M-theory, dualities, emergent space-time, etc. etc. Turns out he's a fairly smart human.
quantamagazine.org/edward-wi…
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Hey, the internet is 50 years old today! The first data was transmitted over Arpanet (its prototype) on Oct. 29, 1969. And no kidding: that first transmission was "LOL," after a botched attempt to transmit "LOGIN" had to be started over. Joke's on us I guess.
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We now know what triggers lightning bolts: ice crystals, not cosmic rays. A radio telescope network in Europe is finally demystifying lightning through detailed observations inside thunderclouds, @thomaslewton reports. quantamagazine.org/radio-tel…
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Surprising how simple it is. Another einstein-ish tile is the Socolar-Taylor tile, discovered by amateur mathematician Joan Taylor. But it consists of multiple disconnected parts:
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My partner has read a lot of crap I’ve written about black holes over the years, but when I mentioned last night that black holes are spheres, it blew her mind, so for anyone else who I forgot to point that out to: They’re spheres. You’re welcome.
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BREAKING: So about those muons! We went deep into this exciting and multifaceted story, real deep, please enjoy. #gminus2 quantamagazine.org/muon-g-2-…
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Here I tell the story of one of the most ambitious engineering projects ever attempted, interwoven with a tale of tremendous progress and ongoing efforts to understand the cosmos and our place in it. @astrogrant's inshallah (+skyward glance): “Please work.”quantamagazine.org/why-nasas…
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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Albert Bartlett en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert…
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20 years ago, the SeaQuest experiment set out to investigate the antimatter inside protons, the particles in atoms' centers. Here's my story about their results—finally published today!—and what we're learning about what a proton *is.* quantamagazine.org/protons-a…
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Curious to see so many people approve of the article but bristle at the headline. Can someone (who has actually read our article or the Nature paper) articulate *why* they don’t think it’s valid to say the experiment created a wormhole? 1/4 quantamagazine.org/physicist…
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What we can say for sure is that the endless semantic debate over whether "science" refers to a body of knowledge or a process is the most tedious thing in the known universe
nope. science itself isn't "true" it's a constantly refining process used to uncover truths based in material reality and that process is still full of misteaks. neil just posts ridiculous sound bites like this for clout and he has no respect for epistemology
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Terry Tao & co. have just rewritten their paper about the eigenvector-eigenvalue identity that I covered in Quanta. They now review ~2 dozen independent discoveries of the ID that have come to light since our article took off and analyze the sociology: arxiv.org/abs/1908.03795
Particle physicists have stumbled across a previously hidden connection between two ubiquitous objects in math.
quantamagazine.org/neutrinos…
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Isaac Newton once wrote a list of all the sins he could remember committing. It's spectacular. newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/…
"Making pies on Sunday night"
"Punching my sister"
"Using unlawful means to bring us out of distresses" (Hmm...)
"Lying about a louse"
etc.
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I love that @TheAtlantic's top story right now is about horseshoe crabs. And it is indeed an incredible story, by @sarahzhang, that will teach you what is happening in this incredible photo: theatlantic.com/science/arch…
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I embedded with top cosmologists at a recent meeting in Santa Barbara, where they declared themselves “in crisis.” The universe appears to be expanding too fast — faster than their standard theory predicts. It could be the break they’ve long hoped for. quantamagazine.org/cosmologi…
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Hello! I’m back on the job as physics editor @QuantaMagazine and eager for pitches. X’s science journalism community has become something of a bleached coral reef, but any writers out there with story ideas or general interest in working together, please DM me. Thanks! 💡✍️
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that, but physicists are still pretty psyched about a huge anomaly reported yesterday by the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab. My story: quantamagazine.org/evidence-…
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Seeing many biologists acknowledge the possibility that 3 million people might have died because controversial genetic enhancements of viruses were being done in an insecure lab, but arguing that it doesn't matter either way, is blowing my mind
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Something out there in space can accelerate atoms to 99.99999999999999999999951% the speed of light. That was the speed of the Oh-My-God particle, which struck Earth's sky in 1991 with the oomph of a bowling ball dropped on a toe. So where'd it come from? quantamagazine.org/high-ener…
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Deeply honored to be invited by Cornell and looking forward to spending time there this spring. Get in touch, Cornellians!
We're excited to welcome award-winning science writer Natalie Wolchover as the Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences for spring 2022!
@nattyover @QuantaMagazine
@cohen_lab @Twindynasty
@kaushikcbasu
as.cornell.edu/news/natalie-…
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If you know what octonions are, who are you?? If not, @LucyIkkanda made this epic infographic:
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Typically beautiful piece by @andersen about animal cognition. How fascinating that bird brains have a structure "that appears to be networked in cortexlike ways, a tantalizing clue that nature may have more than one method of making a conscious brain." theatlantic.com/magazine/arc…
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.@KSHartnett's great new article on the Navier-Stokes equations comes with this beautiful gif, which shows the complex instabilities that arise when two fluids move past each other at different speeds. quantamagazine.org/mathemati…
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Wendy Freedman reports her latest determination of the cosmic expansion rate based on highly cross-checked distances to tip-of-the-red-giant-branch stars. She gets 69.8 km/s/Mpc, consistent w/ the standard model. If she’s right, there's no Hubble tension. arxiv.org/abs/2106.15656
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We're hiring! Physics writers, math writers, computer science writers, visual designers/producers, please apply. This is a significant expansion of @QuantaMagazine's small team. quantamagazine.org/about/
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New experiments find that materials called "strange metals" dissipate energy at what appears to be a fundamental speed limit — the same one reached by black holes. It's a major mystery that could be the key to "quantum strangeness at its deepest level." quantamagazine.org/universal…
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Spent the wee hours understanding electroweak theory better than I have before and my god, how insanely complicated yet tidy it is. Some humans are very, very, very, very smart. Imagine coming up with that theory then seeing the weak neutral current data a few short years later.
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I wrote about how astrophysicists are detecting magnetic fields seemingly everywhere they look in the universe, and how this pervasive magnetism, if it's primordial, could solve one of the biggest questions in cosmology. quantamagazine.org/the-hidde…
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I wrote about how theorists are using topology to classify all possible emergent particle behaviors. But one phase of matter with bizarre fractal properties breaks the scheme and suggests untold possibilities to come: quantamagazine.org/physicist…
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If you've never read "More is Different" by Phil Anderson, the great condensed matter physicist who died yesterday, well, you should: tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2…
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This Möbius strip worldsheet diagram was key to the calculation that triggered the first superstring revolution. I had to draw it to understand. Craziness!
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For the first time, cosmologists have shown how a universe could theoretically bounce, giving new life into an underdog theory of the cosmos. My new article in @QuantaMagazine: quantamagazine.org/big-bounc…
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Didn't mean it as a slur. Amateur mathematicians have made major discoveries in tiling, an area of math that's non-technical enough for brilliant laypeople.
Check out my 2017 story, "Marjorie Rice's Secret Pentagons": quantamagazine.org/marjorie-…
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My take on today's impeachment proceedings: quantamagazine.org/neutrinos…
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Physicists are discovering exotic new synchronization patterns, beyond the global synchrony exhibited by these fireflies, for example. They're exploring the link between sync and symmetry, and learning to predict and control the phenomenon. My new story: quantamagazine.org/physicist…
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Put a particle inside a triangle and things get weird
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The first interstellar object to pass through our solar system doesn't NOT seem like an alien probe. 10 times longer than it is wide, probably metal, coming from the star Vega... Too late to check for a golden record? :D eso.org/public/news/eso1737/
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I wrote about a newly proposed experiment that could detect a sure sign of otherwise invisible quantum gravity – "the grin of the Cheshire cat."
quantamagazine.org/physicist…
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I asked four physicists what's different about gravity. Interesting answers here, and all very different from one another: quantamagazine.org/why-gravi…
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The polymath scientist Robert May, who studied how complex dynamics arise from simple interactions, has died at 84. I loved writing about his work on ecosystem stability and how it ushered the study of a mysteriously ubiquitous mathematical phenomenon: quantamagazine.org/beyond-th…
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Seven times more gamma radiation is coming from the sun than expected and there's a curious gap in the spectrum. “It’s amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong about something we should understand really well: the sun,” one astrophysicist told me. New: quantamagazine.org/gamma-ray…
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Karen Uhlenbeck becomes the first woman to win the Abel Prize, math’s lifetime achievement award. Love the kicker quote in @EricaKlarreich’s great profile: In math, “I have been saved from boredom, dourness, and self-absorption. One cannot ask for more.”
quantamagazine.org/karen-uhl…
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I blogged about Lenny Susskind’s proposed solution to a fascinating black hole puzzle, which is spurring new thinking about the quantum nature of space-time inside black holes. quantamagazine.org/why-black…
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Remarkable paper. Arrhenius nailed the greenhouse effect, writing, "Thus if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression." He figured out a crazy # of details already in 1896.
Who was the first person to predict global warming? #NobelPrize laureate Svante Arrhenius some 124 years ago.
Read the paper he published in Philosophical Magazine all the way back in 1896 (pdf): rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896…
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Confusion surrounds the nature of time. The physicist Nicolas Gisin argues that the problem is mathematical. In recent papers, he claims that math with finite numbers describes a universe in which time passes and the future is open. New by me: quantamagazine.org/does-time…
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Computer simulations of the 14-billion-year history of the cosmos are now being used as laboratories for exploring the mysteries of the real universe. My story on this burgeoning approach to cosmology, and findings about black holes, superbubbles and more: quantamagazine.org/coder-phy…
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The black hole essay you want to read. Astrophysicist and writer @JannaLevin reflects on the image: quantamagazine.org/what-the-…
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You might have heard that progress has been made toward resolving Hawking's black hole information paradox. What's it all about? I spoke with Netta Engelhardt, one of the leaders of the crew of 30-somethings who have corrected Hawking's 1974 formula. quantamagazine.org/this-phys…
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Twenty years ago, as a kid with at least half a brain, this was actually what I figured the news would look like in 2021
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My story on a huge controversy that has erupted among string theorists over the last few weeks. Is our universe in string theory's "swampland" of impossible universes? quantamagazine.org/dark-ener…
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I hope you’ll enjoy my new interview of Matt Genge, a planetary scientist who for 30 years has studied the cosmic dust that constantly flutters down on Earth.
Did you know about this dust? How beautiful is this dust? quantamagazine.org/matt-geng…
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Humanity suddenly has something people have wanted for, well, forever: the precise distances to the stars. Cosmologists have swiftly used the new data to firm up their measurements of the expansion rate of the universe—deepening a crisis. My story:
quantamagazine.org/astronome…
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I wrote about recent virtuoso experiments that have measured how long particles take to tunnel through walls. Physicists have obsessed over this question for nearly a century, because it raises a bigger question: What is time, even?
quantamagazine.org/quantum-t…
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Oh my gosh, such a wonderful William James quote slipped into this piece (newyorker.com/news/daily-com…):
“We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”
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While 643 of America's richest billionaires gained $843 billion (markets.businessinsider.com/…), 8 million of their fellow citizens sunk into poverty. nytimes.com/2020/10/15/us/po…
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Having fun dipping into the text of 𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘪𝘢 for the first time. Here is Isaac Newton suspecting that "the rest of the phenomena of nature" (aside from gravity) also spring from unknown forces between particles. Clever chap!
mtsu.edu/faculty/wding/The_M…
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