Joined September 2009
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I guess I'm on the other site now. Give me a heads-up (here or there) if you want me to follow you there.
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There is lots of great ongoing work in physics on exactly this question: when does the ergodic hypothesis (e.g., entropy maximization) hold and when does it not? In other words, when does thermodynamics work and when does it not?
I don't...buy the ergodic hypothesis in stat mech. Any recs for how to get comfortable (even empirical?) Seems just obviously not something that follows from first principles - unless it's like every system is noisy and that's why? But aren't there attractor trajectories that would kinda violate it? Stat mech would be so much easier if I believed in statistics, lol
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Here is a talk by me on one variant of this question. It turns out that if you subject a collection of particles to random dynamics, but you force them to conserve their center of mass, then they will only obey ergodicity if their density is high enough youtube.com/watch?v=aF28QfSl…
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RT @michael_nielsen: Harvard. PEPFAR. LIGO. Basic science. And dozens of other crown jewels of not just the US, but of humanity. And one…
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Brian Skinner retweeted
Watching electronic ice melt | Science science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… I’m delighted to share a perspective I co-authored with Brian Skinner (@gravity_levity), highlighting an exciting new experiment that captures quantum melting in a disordered 2D Wigner solid.
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Brian Skinner retweeted
"Gut Biomes win championships" - Nico Harrison
26 Apr 2025
JJ Redick said that Luka Doncic hasn’t been feeling well for 24 hours. He doesn’t think Doncic slept much last night. He was throwing up all afternoon going into the game. And Redick isn’t sure what caused the halftime delay to cause him not to start the second half.
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Brian Skinner retweeted
We’re celebrating #IYQ2025 with monthly #quantum science collections. March’s edition explores measurement-induced quantum phase transitions — where measurement competes with internal evolution, triggering a phase transition in entanglement structure. 🔗 go.aps.org/4iCyRPU
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Brian Skinner retweeted
Replying to @InnaVishik
The utility of photovoltaics seems possible precisely because the science is so boring: it's the same p-n junction that we've had since the 1940s. The more interesting the science, the more skeptical one must be of claims of utility.
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the story of the Microsoft claim of topological qubits so far
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Briefly poking my head into this site to make sure you know that Microsoft has absolutely not realized a new phase of matter, nor have they created a new type of qubit.
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Replying to @postquantum
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If you want to contact your senators/congressmen about the NIH freeze, the advice I've been given is to keep it brief and emphasize why it matters to you personally. Here's what I sent just now. science.org/content/article/…
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Posted my first scientific explainer thread in forever over at the other site
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If I link it here will people see it? 🤔 bsky.app/profile/gravity-lev…

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This is one of the great (and dangerous) things about getting a PhD: it the last remaining realm of education where there is enormous variance in what and how you learn. It still produces a wide range of thinking styles and competencies among people getting the same degree.
That one time @DavidDeutschOxf spoke to Richard Feynman: “We had a wide-ranging conversation, mostly about quantum theory and computation, but we deviated a bit to talk about physics generally. And I said that physics seems to have slowed down, and he said, “There will be no more great physicists.” And I was like, “Oh, what makes you say that?” Because I wasn’t thinking like that at all, because I was lucky enough to be among several of them and learning from them. And he said, there will be no more of them. So I said, why? And he said, “Well, because of physics education.” He didn’t put it in exactly the way that I would today, but it was that it was very narrow, and everybody was taught to do the same thing. I don’t think he had any objection to this concept of being taught a thing or to have a curriculum, but he thought it was becoming narrower and narrower. And the reason it’s becoming narrower is because that’s the only way you can base it on exams. And if you want to have a world in which most people go to university, let’s say, then you need to have standards for going to university. And these standards have to be determined by exams, otherwise it’s unfair. And if they’re determined by exams, they have to be determined by a uniform curriculum. When I was in school, there was no national curriculum. Every school had its own curriculum. There were dozens of different examination boards that set exams, and each school could choose: we’ll have this board for physics, and we’ll have this board for history, according to what the teachers in the school thought was a good idea to force their pupils to learn. So that part of it wasn’t the way I would have it. But the state didn’t take a view, and most importantly, it didn’t take a uniform view that everybody in the country had to learn this thing. And that was the thing that Feynman was objecting to—that everybody in the country learning the same thing. And by the time they get to university and by the time they’ve done an undergraduate degree, they’ve learned to become proficient. I mean, those that pass through the sieve and eventually get to become physicists or something, they have all learned how to do the same thing in the same way. And that’s going to put a damper on doing things a different way, a new way. Of course, Feynman, in his life and in his research career, was constantly doing things in a new way, in ways that people didn’t approve of. And I think, well, I’m not a pessimist, so I don’t think there aren’t going to be any more great physicists. I’m expecting that there are, because I’m expecting that the Enlightenment will spread to educational theory as it has spread to many other aspects of life.”
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... huh.
5 Nov 2024
QC's WK9 NFL Thoughts - QUANTCOACH.COM #Patriots Mayo should’ve gone for 2 vs #Titans with hat tip to ⁦@gravity_levity⁩; also #Saints dump after loss to #Panthers; #Cowboys collapsing quantcoach.com/qcs-wk9-nfl-t…
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Brian Skinner retweeted
Join us TOMORROW, 11/4, at 12:45 pm in Foldy Room and Zoom for a condensed matter seminar! Brian Skinner (@gravity_levity) of @OSUPhysics will be speaking on "Johnson noise thermometry using ohmic and hydrodynamic electrons." #physics #condensedmatter @cwru @CWRUartsci
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Sometimes being a dad means that you have to make a promise to your toddler and you end up lecturing to your graduate class wearing a giant sloth costume
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This is one of the most aesthetically unpleasant things I have ever seen. Imagine thinking that quantum mechanics is just a jumble partial differential equations and ugly special functions.
Schrödinger's cat made with Schrödinger's equation. ✍️
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Brian Skinner retweeted
Update: I plan to release a second edition of Plastic Fantastic by Kindle and Paperback through Amazon, correcting typos but otherwise not making changes. If you are or know a skilled typesetter available to help me reformat the cover art and manuscript please reach out.
Today the rights to publish Plastic Fantastic: How The Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook The Scientific World, originally published 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan concerning the fraud of Jan Hendrik Schon at Bell Labs, reverted to me the author. 🧵
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