african physicist trying not to destroy the world. associate professor at uc berkeley. studies tiny particles with gigantic accelerators. opinions my own.

Joined November 2008
Photos and videos
It’s such a mind shift traveling on a US passport instead of a (South) African one. What do you mean I can just get on a plane and show up in new countries with no extensive planning required?
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Heather Gray retweeted
“I’m completely stunned, it never occurred to me that it would be the basis of a Nobel Prize.” New physics laureate John Clarke was completely surprised when he discovered he had been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. At this morning's press conference he reflected on his prize-awarded research: “Our discovery is in some way the basis of quantum computing.” #NobelPrize
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Heather Gray retweeted
“I can’t imagine accepting the prize without them.” In this interview shortly after the prize announcement, new physics laureate John Clarke is still stunned by the news. He praises his co-laureates John Martinis and Michel Devoret, who he worked together with at a lab in Berkeley, California, some 40 years ago. Clarke recollects the many discussions and extensive work that eventually led to their Nobel Prize-awarded discoveries. “It took us a long time to get all of this worked out. None of this work would have happened without the two of them.” Listen to the interview here. #NobelPrize
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Waking up to a Nobel prize for Berkeley this morning! Big congratulations to all. Going to be fun working with the students on the Josephson Junction experiment today.
BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 #NobelPrize in Physics to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”
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Today’s schedule at the European Strategy Meeting for Particle Physics starts at 9 am and ends at 8 pm!
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Waiting more than an hour on the ground at @flySFO after landing. Is it really so hard to get people off a plane?
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1.5 hours hard apparently
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Heather Gray retweeted
CERN's experiments are global efforts. The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics honors over 13,000 researchers whose labors have led to the precise description the Higgs mechanism, the discovery of dozens of new particles, analysis of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry and exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions. breakthroughprize.org/News/9… @CERN
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Heather Gray retweeted
CERN's secular challenge: Can we predict what technologies will be available 50 years from now that could make high-energy colliders radically different — or even obsolete? And can we even imagine what questions physicists will be asking in 2070? #FCC nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
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Whoa: support.microsoft.com/en-us/…. So much of ATLAS communication goes via Skype.

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Heather Gray retweeted
It begins
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First time talking about my own death in a physics talk 🤣
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Hey @Airport_FRA, thanks for making things more difficult for those traveling with little ones. Manual screening with sleeping baby, not possible. Asking to file a complaint, I was given a document instead of being allowed to talk to the six folks at the counter doing nothing.
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Catching up on the latest in Higgs physics in beautiful Uppsala. indico.cern.ch/event/1391236…
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RT @EricTopol: My oped on the JN.1 variant and the 2nd biggest US wave of infections (after Omicron) since the pandemic began t.co/
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This is probably the first physics meeting I’ve been to where no coffee I provided. I hope this doesn’t tell us something about the budget.
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Tromso Punta arenas Kihei Sydney
Narvik San Francisco Hobart Byron Bay (Excluding layovers) If I count places I've stayed for a longer period then it's not that far off the same places though: Luleå (currently) Berkeley (extended research programme) Frankston (Melbourne) Armidale (NSW, Aus)
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Heather Gray retweeted
Want to make science faculty in this country 3% more productive for .000001% of the national research budget? Adopt a single standardized tool for uploading recommendation letters for PhD applications. @NSF @JoeBiden
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