We're Not Ready for Self-Building AI, But it's Happening youtube.com/watch?v=QADKN3ha…

Anthropic TLDR

What happens when you divide an indivisible particle? Researchers from the University of Oslo in Norway have calculated what happens when a single photon is cut short by a shutter. A photon is a quantum of light, and as such indivisible qua mathematical definition. One might guess that blocking part of its wave packet leaves a superposition of two parts, one moving on, one not. The authors say the answer is much more difficult—and more interesting. According to their calculation, the result is a state with superpositions of 0, 1, 2, and in principle arbitrarily many photons. So it seems that cutting the photon creates infinitely many photons! The authors say that the reason is that cutting the photon itself requires energy, which creates photons, and theoretically infinite many of them. Paper: Rukan et al, PRL (2026), arXiv:2510.21636

I have similar concerns about the future of research/the academy, but without tenure (and won't be getting it in time). Things are about to get wild.

“The authors do not argue for banning artificial intelligence. They argue that the problem is the incentive system. If researchers are rewarded for producing more papers rather than better papers, of course they will use artificial intelligence to get that done.”

Grok is maximally truthful

Physicists are rethinking matter... in the wrong way youtube.com/watch?v=Wdf5_vad…

I gave @AnthropicAI's new Fable 5 my hardest challenge: explain the Riemann Hypothesis — math's most famous unsolved problem — to anyone. Two prompts later: a full interactive site this video, scored with music composed from the zeta zeros themselves 🤯🎵 riemann.adilmoujahid.com

I made a personal black hole that makes you take breaks 🕳️ A shader for Ghostty that spawns a small black hole in your terminal - it drifts around, gravitationally lensing your text. The longer you work without stopping, the bigger it gets, until it's basically demanding you go touch grass Take a break and it quietly shrinks away

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience (part of @FrontNeurosci). It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

I have written papers debunking the works of half these authors (Raworth, Piketty, Hickel). All three for being sloppy (Piketty and Hickel), and/or self-contradicting (Raworth and Hickel), and/or outright incompetent (Hickel). References below:

Here is this month's science news wrapup with @LKrauss1 Enjoy! youtube.com/watch?v=WxSUG32R…

I don't think anyone says it's impossible to put a data centre into space. I mean, look, we ALREADY have satellites running on solar doing compute. The question is whether it makes financial sense given the current technology. x.com/yatharthmann/status/20…

Women hold advantages over men on most faculty hiring dimensions--and plenty of the published research indicates as much. However, the narrative of sexist higher ed persists. Wondering how many other popular ideas refuse to surrender to the facts.

Who is the greatest scientist of all time (in terms of Google Scholar citations)? Is it Einstein? Or Bengio or Hinton? No. It is a humble servant of knowledge, Mr. Rachmad of Indonesia, who has had a rather productive publishing period after the launch of ChatGPT

Academics write for each other, not for people. Steven Pinker has spent over four decades doing the opposite, and thinks current academic writing is "enormous wasted effort." "There's an awful lot of brilliant work, really smart people in academia. Why are they doing it? Just to entertain each other? Taxpayers pay for it. It should be accessible. Why should I have to read a paragraph five or six times? It gets under my skin when academics devote so much brainpower into the scholarship and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done."