4gravitons

[4gravitons]

No Unmoved Movers

Economists must find academics confusing. When investors put money in a company, they have some control over what that company does. They vote to decide a board, and the board votes to hire a CEO. If the company isn’t doing what the investors want, the board can fire the CEO, or the investors can vote in a new board. Everybody is incentivized to do what the people who gave the money want to…

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#academia #DoingScience #PublicPerception

[4gravitons]

The Hidden Higgs

Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist whose name graces the Higgs boson, died this week. Peter Higgs, after the Higgs boson discovery was confirmed This post isn’t an obituary: you can find plenty of those online, and I don’t have anything special to say that others haven’t. Reading the obituaries, you’ll notice they summarize Higgs’s contribution in different ways. Higgs was one of the people…

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#Higgs #LHC #particle physics #PublicPerception #quantum field theory

[4gravitons]

Making More Nails

They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Academics are a bit smarter than that. Confidently predict a world of nails, and you fall to the first paper that shows evidence of a screw. There are limits to how long you can delude yourself when your job is supposed to be all about finding the truth. You can make your own nails, though. Suppose there’s something you’re…

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#academia #DoingScience #PublicPerception

[4gravitons]

Generalizing a Black Box Theory

In physics and in machine learning, we have different ways of thinking about models. A model in physics, like the Standard Model, is a tool to make predictions. Using statistics and a whole lot of data (from particle physics experiments), we fix the model’s free parameters (like the mass of the Higgs boson). The model then lets us predict what we’ll see next: when we turn on the Large Hadron…

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#Machine Learning #particle physics #philosophy of science #theoretical physics

[4gravitons]

How Subfields Grow

A commenter recently asked me about the different “tribes” in my sub-field. I’ve been working in an area called “amplitudeology”, where we try to find more efficient ways to make predictions (calculate “scattering amplitudes”) for particle physics and gravitational waves. I plan to do a longer post on the “tribes” of amplitudeology…but not this week. This week, I’ve got a simpler goal. I want to…

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#academia #amplitudes

[4gravitons]

An "Open-Source" Grant Proposal

Back in the Fall, I spent most of my time writing a grant proposal. In Europe, getting a European Research Council (ERC) grant is how you know you’ve made it as a researcher. Covering both science and the humanities, ERC grants give a lump of funding big enough to hire a research group, turning you from a lone expert into a local big-shot. The grants last five years, and are organized by…

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#academia #DoingScience

[4gravitons]

What Are Particles? The Gentle Introduction

On this blog, I write about particle physics for the general public. I try to make things as simple as possible, but I do have to assume some things. In particular, I usually assume you know what particles are! This time, I won’t do that. I know some people out there don’t know what a particle is, or what particle physicists do. If you’re a person like that, this post is for you! I’m going to…

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#electron #history of science #LHC #particle physics #proton #theoretical physics

[4gravitons]

France for Non-EU Spouses of EU Citizens: To Get Your Rights, Don’t Follow the Rules

I’m a German citizen, my wife is not. When we moved to France, we were confused. Looking at the French government’s website, we couldn’t figure out a crucial question: when, and how, would she have the right to work? We talked to the French embassy and EU aid organizations, got advice from my employer and blogs and Facebook groups. She’s a schoolteacher, and we wanted to make sure she was able…

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#France #immigration

[4gravitons]

It's all a (ML) hallucination, man.

Book Review: The Case Against Reality

Nima Arkani-Hamed shows up surprisingly rarely in popular science books. A major figure in my former field, Nima is extremely quotable (frequent examples include “spacetime is doomed” and “the universe is not a crappy metal”), but those quotes don’t seem to quite have reached the popular physics mainstream. He’s been interviewed in books by physicists, and has a major role in one popular physics…

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[4gravitons]

Book Review: The Case Against Reality

Nima Arkani-Hamed shows up surprisingly rarely in popular science books. A major figure in my former field, Nima is extremely quotable (frequent examples include “spacetime is doomed” and “the universe is not a crappy metal”), but those quotes don’t seem to quite have reached the popular physics mainstream. He’s been interviewed in books by physicists, and has a major role in one popular physics…

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#book review #particle physics #philosophy of science #psychology #quantum field theory #quantum mechanics #relativity #string theory

[4gravitons]

Valentine's Day Physics Poem 2024

It’s that time of year again! In one of this blog’s yearly traditions, I’m posting a poem mixing physics and romance. For those who’d like to see more, you can find past years’ poems here. Modeling Together Together, we set out to model the world, and learn something new.The Physicist said,“My model is simple, the model of fundamental things. Particles go in, particles go out. For each…

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#Machine Learning #particle physics #Valentine&039;s Day Physics Poem

[4gravitons]

Neu-tree-no Detector

I’ve written before about physicists’ ideas for gigantic particle accelerators, proposals for machines far bigger than the Large Hadron Collider or even plans for a Future Circular Collider. The ideas ranged from wacky but not obviously impossible (a particle collider under the ocean) to pure science fiction (a beam of neutrinos that can blow up nukes across the globe). But what if you don’t…

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#particle physics

[4gravitons]

My Secret, Cap

I’d been meaning, for a while now, to write a post about how I got my permanent job. It lands a bit differently now that I’ve given that job up, but I think the post is still worth making. Note that, while I know how things felt like, I don’t have “inside information” here. I don’t know why the hiring committee chose me, I never really got to the point where I could comfortably ask that. And I…

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[4gravitons]

Why We Are Leaving France: The Misadventures of a Trailing Spouse

In last week’s announcement, I mentioned I’d have a few follow-up posts. This week is a guest post. I want to let my wife tell her side of the story, to talk publicly about what she’s experienced over the last six months. If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you probably know that 4gravitons relocated last year to France, following a long-coveted permanent academic position at the…

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#academia #PublicPerception

[4gravitons]

Well That Didn’t Work

Apologies to anyone who finds the title too flippant. This is a serious situation, and I am taking it seriously. But this is how I write. I mix the absurd and the profound. I build stories. In May, I was offered the kind of position I’d been searching for for years, the kind of position almost everyone in my life at that point was searching for: a permanent position as a theoretical physicist.…

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[4gravitons]

Generalize

What’s the difference between a model and an explanation? Suppose you cared about dark matter. You observe that things out there in the universe don’t quite move the way you would expect. There is something, a consistent something, that changes the orbits of galaxies and the bending of light, the shape of the early universe and the spiderweb of super-clusters. How do you think about that…

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#astronomy #astrophysics #cosmology #particle physics #philosophy of science

[4gravitons]

LHC Black Hole Reassurance: The Professional Version

A while back I wrote a post trying to reassure you that the Large Hadron Collider cannot create a black hole that could destroy the Earth. If you’re the kind of person who is worried about this kind of thing, you’ve probably heard a variety of arguments: that it hasn’t happened yet, despite the LHC running for quite some time, that it didn’t happen before the LHC with cosmic rays of comparable…

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#black hole #LHC #particle physics #PublicPerception