Category Archives: Uncategorized

For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the context of “epistemic collapse”: the … Continue reading →

Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I … Continue reading →

It’s getting hard to wake up every day, read the latest news of the slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the plans to finish off or exile the rest, then go through the two ID checks at the campus gate … Continue reading →

Some random things that may be of interest: Ethan Siegel has a discussion of “vibe physics“, people convincing themselves that they can solve fundamental scientific problems by chatting with an LLM. For a story about one billionaire doing this, see … Continue reading →

This is a guest post from Aravind Asok1. If you have comments about this, you can contact him at asok@usc.edu. We’ll see if there’s some way to later post moderated comments here. Recently, several symposia have been organized in which … Continue reading →

There are some unusual things going on here today. The central university computer system has been having outages since Monday night. No news on the source of these, but this just came in: CUIT has been working around the clock … Continue reading →

First of all, three new books of interest: Jesper Grimstrup has written a book titled The Ant Mill: how theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism, and mass production of research. There’s a lot more about the book at his … Continue reading →

News from here is that as of July 1 I’ll be on a one-semester sabbatical, then will officially retire at the end of the year. This won’t affect that much what I’m actually doing with my time. I’m not moving … Continue reading →