iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 26/09/2026

Four years apart. The first was very shortly after I moved to Vienna haha

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 25/09/2026

Good quote from an article talking about the inevitable dumbing down of society in the AI age

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 17/08/2026

New preprint! Continuing on our work of describing quantum measurements as a dynamical, unitary process, here we apply these principles to numerical simulations of a more realistic many-body system -- a lattice of hopping particles arxiv.org/abs/2608.11319

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 25/06/2026

Funny how three different iconic shots from T2 can be used in different ways to signify "oh fuck it's so hot I'm melting"

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 21/06/2026

Tallinn is absolutely peak. Really enjoyed it here. Probably the best European old town experience I've ever had. I recommend the surprisingly high-effort medieval restaurant Olde Hansa. It has authentically old-timey food and vibes. Super fun.

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 27/05/2026

I truly, honestly, genuinely have been reading Morning Spoilers almost without fail for over 15 years. So I think I have some right to say: what the f- is this?

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 22/05/2026

Had a lot of fun this week doing a Pint of Science talk with my colleague Phila! I think we did a good job with the challenge of explaining quasiprobabilities in quantum mechanics to a general audience!

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 17/05/2026

A lovely weekend away from Vienna, despite the rain yesterday

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 15/05/2026

Tune in on Tuesday to see the video that Pepe Silvia'd me more than anything I've ever worked on.

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 04/05/2026

Budapest is great in general btw. So much neat stuff around, fun vibes. Still loads I want to do next time I visit

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 04/05/2026

Bit of a physicist pilgrimage in Budapest today. Wild fact: Wigner, von Neumann, Teller, and Szilard... all giants of 20th C. physics, all major players in the Manhattan project, all Jews born in the same Budapest district... the first three even went to the same school at about the same time

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 03/05/2026

This but it's thirty not thirty-five and also I'm not an old man yelling at a cloud I swear

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 03/05/2026

Yeah I've basically become radicalised on this recently. Pretty much of the opinion that Everything Bad in the World can be explained by The Bad Black Rectangle and short-form video specifically. Ban social media for under 14s, and over 14s too tbh

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 25/04/2026

Despite working at the Atominstitut for over three years, before this week I'd never seen the reactor while it was in operation. Because the power and radiation output is so low, I reckon this must be as close as it's possible to get to Cherenkov radiation almost anywhere in the world

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 15/04/2026

I'll be giving a talk with my colleague Phila at a Pint of Science event next month in Vienna! We're planning some cool stuff, it should be fun! pintofscience.at/event/trust-...

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 03/04/2026

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles I'm feeling very still And I think my spaceship knows which way to go #ArtemisII www.nasa.gov/missions/art...

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 09/03/2026

New paper in PRA! Continuing our long-running study of quantum measurements as dynamical processes and the emergence of classicality, here we study observables that best encode measurement outcomes under equilibration-on-average dynamics and quantum Darwinism journals.aps.org/pra/abstract...

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 11/02/2026

Happy 200th birthday to UCL! Last time I visited I made sure to snap a photo with my boy JB. I used to pass by him all the time on my way to lunch haha

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 22/01/2026

Had this experience today. Once you start to notice this pattern you really do see it everywhere

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 16/01/2026

Whenever I'm on the London Underground and the announcer says "please make use of all available doors" I always imagine they want me to pass through every aperture simultaneously like a quantum particle

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 09/12/2025

Recently discovered the joy of being on the other side of the interaction from this classic post

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 30/07/2025

Next, we all have that one friend who's just a small collection of qubits, right? Well here we numerically studied what happens to the WF effects as the friend increases in size, finding a form of 'emegence of classicality' as the WF effects faded away.

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 30/07/2025

We also applied our model to the fancy Extended Wigner's Friend Scenarios that everyone's talking about, likewise finding that the model obfuscates genuine effects like the famous Local Friendliness violations.

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 30/07/2025

We found our model produces a new type of Wigner's Friend disagreement (or 'paradox') using coherence between the friend and the environment. But this new effect is hard to tell apart from some more mundane sources of error that arise when complicating the WF setup.

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 21/04/2025

Philosophy of science by the thermal bath swimming pool. Not a bad weekend in Bad Blumau 😎

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 15/04/2025

A proud older brother making an embarrassed younger brother take credit for his hard work ❤️

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 08/03/2025

My brother came to Vienna this weekend for, well...

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 27/01/2025

Finally figured out how to fiddle with the DNS settings in my tomrivlin.com domain, so... new Bluesky handle! I'm now just @tomrivlin.com

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 18/12/2024

I feel quite proud of this: I'm officially qualified to speak German at the B2 level. Just one year ago I passed a B1 part 1 exam, so pretty quick progress!

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 11/12/2024

A good reminder for everyone to watch the very good Pokémon Concierge miniseries on Netflix

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 17/11/2024

Next week, 23/11/24, marks the 100th anniversary of this NYT article announcing Edwin Hubble's discovery of "island universes" -- distant galaxies outside our own. Pretty big moment in the history of science! www.nytimes.com/1924/11/23/a...

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 16/10/2024

I've been playing Marvel Snap for about two years now and I'd like to think I've got pretty good at it. Today I managed to reach the top 10,000 players worldwide for the first time!

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 18/09/2024

This was fun www.arealme.com/vocabulary-s...

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 14/07/2024

Bell's Theorem Crescent, Belfast, 2018/Hamilton's Quaternion Bridge (Broombridge), Dublin, 2024

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 01/05/2024

From Boltzmann's Vienna to Maxwell's Edinburgh! Had loads of fun giving this talk at Heriot-Watt about in-progress work of ours on quantum versions of the 2nd law. Many thanks to the group of Mehul Malik for being wonderful hosts! 🤩

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 12/04/2024

The so-called "World Quantum Day" is this weekend. It is on the 14th of April, for a very, very, very, VERY silly set of reasons. (I know that 1st of May has other meanings, but I'm just saying... ℏ~1.05 in SI units 🤔)

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 05/04/2024

New SciShow I worked on is out: "The Solar System is Beige" www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdUo... Ever noticed how two "true colour" images of the same planet (e.g. Mars) can look, err... wildly different? This new video tells you the various reasons why that could happen!

A "true color" image of Mars that looks very red https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2007/02/True-colour_image_of_Mars_seen_by_OSIRIS

A "true color" image of Mars that looks a lot less red! https://www.simplerockets.com/CelestialBodies/View/48xX1m/Mars-True-Color

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 19/02/2024

Sehr aufregend! Endlich habe ich die Duolingo Deutschkurs fertiggemacht! Leider bin ich noch nicht fließend, aber sicher kann ich viel Deutsch sprechen und verstanden. Vielen Dank, Duo die Eule! 🦉🦉🦉

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 03/10/2023

Nobel Prize in physics goes to someone formerly affiliated with TU Wien for the second year in a row! Ferenc Krausz did some of the Nobel-winning work while at TU in 2001. Nice to see attosecond science get recognition, too

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 29/08/2023

Finished reading the four Chronicles of the Avatar novels by F.C. Yee and... they're great! Highly recommend them to fans of the original Airbender/Korra shows. Brilliant reads in their own right, and they capture the spirit of the shows whilst adding cool new twists

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Tom Rivlin @tomrivlin.com · 20/08/2023

Joining bluesky and seeing posts from people I follow who left twitter months ago like

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