I've met people who think they're uncomfortable with evolution, but when you actually talk to them, they're worried about something very different. They ask, "How could something come from nothing? How could life come from non-life?" Biologists aren't sure of the origin of life. They're working on it, there's a whole research field on what the experts call abiogenesis. But it's hard going, because there's so little direct evidence.

For the folks who found this blog from Anthropic's site, welcome! For everyone else, I'd better give some context. Last month, I had a blog post titled "It Only Counts When AI Gets to My Field". The title was a joke, the content less so. I said that if some of the longstanding problems of my old research field got solved by AI, then I'd sit up and take notice.

There's a lovely resource that I suspect most non-physicists don't know about. It's called the Particle Data Group, and its interactive site PDGLive. If you want to know the most up-to-date information on a subatomic particle, PDGLive has your back. From their home page, you can click on familiar particles like photons ($latex \gamma$), electrons ($latex e$) or gluons and find the best info experiments have provided on properties like their mass and charge.

Last week, I talked about how truthseekers get paid. But truth-tellers and truth-seekers are different things. Consider educational kids' shows on public television. Nobody who works on Sesame Street is out there uncovering new letters and numbers. Bill Nye's show wasn't bringing analysis fresh from the lab. The purpose of these shows is to educate. The purpose of education is to change minds.

Academics and journalists have a lot in common, at least in principle. Whether you're a reporter or a professor, your job is to go out into the world and figure out the truth. You're supposed to be careful, to check and correct for how you might be wrong. And at the end of the day you're supposed to communicate what you found.

The James Webb Space Telescope seems to have discovered more ancient black holes than theory had predicted, and now we have a new way to explain why

Dark matter bugs people. I've talked before about why, and why it, and other beyond-the-standard-model proposals like those inspired by MOND, are nonetheless credible with physicists. But beyond the logic in that post, there's a deeper reason people find dark matter strange. It's that they don't know what kind of an explanation dark matter is. Dark matter sounds very lazy.

I had a recurring "elevator pitch" at Lancefest earlier this summer. After explaining that I'm a science journalist now, I'd end with "so if you run into a story, let me know!" One person had a question that left me stumped: "What counts as a story?" For those of us who don't happen to be Einstein I didn't have a good response then.

I swear this isn't turning into an AI blog. But did you see the one about the Riemann hypothesis? Someone at Anthropic did something I'm sure they're all tempted to do, and tried to use an internal version of their Claude AI system to prove the most famous open conjecture in mathematics. It didn't work, to be clear, and I get the impression they didn't expect it to.

It's a meme at this point. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov, Go players could say that their game, unlike Chess, was too complex to fall to a computer program. Then AlphaGo showed they were wrong. It just took a better approach. When AlphaFold leaped ahead of human experts in predicting how proteins fold, it was due to a mountain of carefully labeled protein structure data.

I had two pieces up this month, one in New Scientist and one in Quanta. I figured I'd give a bit of "bonus info" for both here. The New Scientist piece covered a paper arguing that, according to the supernova evidence, there is no need for dark energy, because the universe isn't speeding up after all. That's a pretty dramatic claim, and it's one the majority of cosmologists don't agree with.

As an atheist, I started out frustrated by how little interest religious people had in debating their beliefs. Much of that was probably to do with how obnoxious it was to be "debated" by a socially awkward ten-year-old. But as I appreciate now, defending religious beliefs is just not a core activity for most religious people, even the experts. While there are many theologians who study the doctrines of their various religions, only a few engage in…

An analysis of supernovae argues that the universe’s expansion is not speeding up, so there is no need for dark energy to exist to explain it

I don't think people who argue about reductionism are really arguing about reductionism. Reductionism is the idea that the behavior of big, complicated things (people, economies, ecosystems) boils down to the behavior of their smallest constituents (molecules, atoms, subatomic particles). It's often contrasted with emergence, the idea that new rules emerge in those big, complicated systems that are more than just the rules that govern the smallest scales.

This is a continuation of my conference coverage from last week. The same warnings apply: this is much more technical than my usual posts, readers beware! Last week I covered the talks from Monday through Wednesday, so I'll jump right in here with Thursday morning, where the first speaker was Francesco Riva, who after a brief ad for his new board game…

The Brazen Head, Irelands oldest pub, Est. 1198. Enjoy traditional Irish music, Irish food and a traditional Irish bar in the heart of Dublin city.

This week was Amplitudes, my old subfield's big yearly conference. This year, it's at Queen Mary University of London. I'm too busy to attend these days, now that nobody is paying me a salary to do that sort of thing. But it's still a good chance to keep up with the field, which helps me find stories. And I know I have a few readers who are interested.

Astronomers have recently started looking for black holes bigger than galaxies. Brian Lacki explains how these “stupendously large black holes” might be used by alien civilisations, and what makes the...

It's been a while since I've said this: I'm at a conference this week! Specifically, I'm at Lancefest, which is not just any old conference, but a birthday conference for Lance Dixon. When a renowned academic turns 60 or so, their students and collaborators hold a birthday party-flavored conference for them. The conferences are usually a mix of academic talks and reminiscences, with the occasional roast thrown in.

I recently finished reading The Orphan Master's Son, a (Pulitzer-winning, apparently) novel set in 2000's-era North Korea. In one plot point, Kim Jong Il has agents steal a Japanese telescope designed to measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, under the mistaken impression that it will help him find uranium. The novel plays it for (horrified) laughs, but I've seen this kind of misunderstanding crop up in the real world too.

Some physicists at the early cyclotrons used their vision to locate high-energy particles. Since then, medical researchers have gained a better understanding of how particles can interact with the hum...

You ever read something and suddenly a whole classification scheme lights up in your head? A thread on X from "stringking42069" showed me a combination of opinions I hadn't seen before. stringking42069 is a pro-string theory commentator with a macho gym bro memer gimmick. He's openly contemptuous of many physicists who describe themselves as string theorists, arguing that only a smaller number really deserve the name.

When arXiv announced it would ban people for hallucinated citations, that is citations of papers that don't exist, the discussion online got sidetracked by the question of whether academics actually read the papers they cite. Some people proudly insisted that any good scholar always reads every paper they reference, others argued that was ridiculous. As always, the answer is never that simple.

In the US, funding agencies seem to be increasingly opposed to an often inevitable feature of good science: international collaboration. Scientists have been told by officials at the National Institutes of Health that they need to remove mention of foreign collaborators from progress reports, or that they need to avoid such collaborations to begin with. At NASA, officials have told scientists that rather than just avoiding funding work in China, they should actively avoid collaborating with Chinese researchers.

Thomas Dietterich, Chair of the Computer Science section of the preprint server arXiv.org, recently clarified the site's policies towards "hallucinated" citations and other signs of careless use of AI in a post on X. If your paper contains a citation to a paper that doesn't actually exist, or has other signs you didn't read it before posting like leftover commentary (the example he gave was "here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?"), then you can get banned from the arXiv for one year.

I'm taking a Danish exam next week, and it's a big one, a culmination of years learning the language. My classmates are stressed. Despite how much we've learned, it feels like we're always making little mistakes. We write the wrong prepositions, put verbs in the wrong form, or mess up the order of words in a sentence. And while we should have time to check our work, that doesn't help as much as it should.

I had a piece up in New Scientist last week (paywalled, sorry!), about a new analysis that suggests the universe is less homogeneous (more "lumpy") that most cosmologists believe. The piece was a bit different than my usual. Normally I do what people in the biz call "features": longer articles about general trends. This was a much more classic "news piece".

Because of last week's "bonus info" post, I'm only now getting around to commenting on this year's Breakthrough Prizes in Fundamental Physics. While I don't comment on them every year, I know enough about several of this year's winners that I figured a post would be helpful. For those who haven't heard of it, the Breakthrough Prizes are a bit like the Nobel, if it was created by a 21st century rich person instead of a 19th century one.

Physicists have long assumed that the universe is uniform at very large scales, but evidence is emerging this is wrong and suggests a way to resolve some of the biggest cosmological mysteries

I had a new piece in Quanta Magazine last week, about a hypothetical trick in theories beyond quantum mechanics called jamming. Sometimes, I get science news stories from contacts. Sometimes I see an academic post something cool on X or Bluesky. But when the stories aren't coming easy, I open up arXiv.org, click on "new", and start browsing. And occasionally, I spot something cool.

It's often said that in quantum physics, everything that can happen will happen. One way this comes up is in something called a path integral, used to calculate the probabilities of quantum events. If you want to find what happens to a particle traveling from point A to point B, you have to add up a contribution for every path, no matter how windy, that goes between A and B.