iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I was thinking the same! Also Queen Margaret of Anjou (wife of Henry VI) invaded as well though was only in power for a year or two before getting deposed again.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Apropos of nothing, I thought you might want to read this previous investigation I did that took over a year. For legal reasons, we could only use documented complaints of rape and SA. I stitched together >60 gigabytes worth of records from 16 different agencies. Conviction rates were about 3-4%.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

#SPJ26 by the numbers: 🤠Members at the conference: 377 👥Members last year: 3,879 ⬆️Membership this year: 4,425 😱Percent increase: 14%

SPJ president talking about the previous year

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Wow, that has to be like winning the Swiss Super Bowl

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

At a similar age, I also snuck my mother‘s phone when she wasn’t looking, though I changed my contact information to “favorite kid.”

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also where @windingdot.bsky.social’s ancestors came from. Scientists are looking into a possible connection

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

You going to SPJ this week? You can borrow my copy

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

So you’re saying you schooled him

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Where specifically at the Library of Congress are these materials? The oral histories in particular seem fascinating. I imagine those folks left few traces of their existence in writing.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This looks fascinating. I just ordered a copy. Wow wait why is only a third digitized? Did you read through all the essays to make this book?

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Ugh this explains our crappy knees, too!

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Ah sorry I misunderstood that. Well, you still have the perfect name because I thought this flowed very well and I learned a lot.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

And all my usual caveats. Funny aside- Me, reading the dedication: Oh wow her dad's last name is Law! I thought- she writes about law... and is a lawyer... that must be a pseudonym. My kid: Seriously?! Your initials are LAW & you're a lawyer! Me: yeah I guess it's the subliminal advertising. 😂

Disclaimers
• This is NOT an endorsement.
• I bought this book with my own money or I checked it out from the library.
• No one asked me to read this book.
• I do not know the author, and I got exactly $0 for reading it.
• Even if I liked the book, that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything the author says.
• A few sentences in a post is not going to do justice to a book several hundred pages long. This is just a few things I found interesting. I suggest reading the whole book yourself.
• Sorry, I can't review your book too. I have a job. I just love expanding my horizons and learning something new!

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Lastly, this book is a fantastic history of the legal battles that ensued over slavery before the Civil War. People are people unless they are property in which case sometimes they are people again? This unfurls the knots of legal logic that twisted America. www.goodreads.com/book/show/38...

goodreads.com

The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggl…

This book tells the story of America's original sin--sl…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This is not to say that those prejudices didn't persist. For example, the federal government would go on to restrict immigration in the 1920s using some very explicitly racist language. But it is fascinating to read about how birth of anthropology challenged many hardwired assumptions.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This book is the true story behind when the federal government paid researchers to study different races. They originally thought they could use the reports to enact more racist policies. Mild spoiler: the actual data did not back up their preconceived notions! www.goodreads.com/en/book/show...

goodreads.com

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthrop…

A dazzling group portrait of Franz Boas, the founder of…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A few other books I would recommend if you like this one. This book is a little dry but goes into the details behind major points in federal immigration law history. www.goodreads.com/book/show/53...

goodreads.com

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Ove…

The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

And this story goes into the chart above in more depth. bsky.app/profile/wali...

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Here are updated numbers on this thanks to the @deportationdata.bsky.social. The author argues that most Americans are now subject to warrantless government surveillance in order to further restrict the liberty of disfavored groups, even if that, again, conflicts with the Constitution.

278 MIGRATION AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
of May 2025, Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) had detained 49,005 migrants. Of those, 21,250, or 43.4 percent, have no criminal record. Xet, the growth of federal government agencies intended to monitor non-citizens also affects US citizens. ICE has turned its panopticon-like domestic surveillance on Immigrants and citizens alike. A 2022 report by researchers at the Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University showed that ICE has collected vast amounts of information into every aspect of the private lives of non-citizens and citizens by tapping digital records of local governments and by purchasing databases from private brokers. Among the highlights of the report's findings,
"ICE has scanned the driver's licenses of 1 in 3 people, has driver's license data of 3 of 4 adults, tracks the movement of drivers, and can locate 3 in 4 adults based on their utility records." All this information has been gathered with
out judicial, legislative, or public oversight." Immigration control, now fused with national security (especially after the 9/11 terror attacks), is hoovering up resources with scant attention to concerns about privacy, due process, and unintended consequences for those swept up in its dragnet.
As authority and management of migration shifted from one level of government to another, a recurring theme is the difficulty for the federal government to standardize immigration law and policy implementation across the realm in a nation as large as the US. S. Deborah Kang carefully analyzed the development of the federal immigration agency (formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service or "INS") which included Border Patrol that ballooned exponentially after federalization. She found as the INS increased in size and funding, parts of it were "unmoored from the oversight of Congress and the courts" because the agency and its personnel were responding to complex economic and soci…

ICE arrests by criminality, 2025 to 2026. Red is convicted criminals, green are those accused of a crime, blue are noncriminals. Among those convicted of a crime, the number one most common one is border crossing.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The very first federal immigration law was actually a restriction on black sailors entering southern ports to preserve slavery.

by interlocking federal and state statutes.® Even with the non-binary division eralism arrangements in migration were mainly operated by the states and the of labor that Mallon and LaCroix describe across multiple subject matters, fed.
area before the Civil War.
federal government did not make a concerted effort to enter that subject matte While the management of Black people's interstate mobility provoked dis agreement among states, there was little disagreement about banning the international slave trade. Long beforg the federal ban on the international siave trade in 1808, northern and southern states individually tried to end the trade with state laws. States had their own reasons for banning the business. Northeastern states were driven by an abhorrence of slavery and southern states worried about insurrections. Most people made a clear distinction between "slave trading and slaveholding" by the beginning of the nineteenth century. For example, South Carolina passed a law "preventing the importation of negros from any port or elsewhere" into the state on December 5, 1800. Virginia updated its previous 1778 law to "prevent the importation of slaves" in January 1801 after Gabriel's Rebellion in the summer of 1800, an uprising led by a literate enslaved black-smith? By the late eighteenth century, agreement on ending the international slave trade spanned both slave and free states and the federal government.° Nineteenth-century state-level migration laws illustrate how laws aimed at regulating international enslaved and free Black people could not be separated from laws restricting the domestic enslaved and free Black people on the move in interstate migration. A federal law passed in 1803 illustrates the dynamics in migration federalism when this law furthered state interests, so the states did not fight it. This law prohibited the master, captain, or anyone from bringing:
Any negro, mulatto, or other person of color, not being a native, a citizen, or registered …

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship" takes a deep dive into what "liberty" actually means in terms of the ability to stay or go & argues that at many points throughout history, the government offered incentives to some while restricting the movement of others based on race or origin.

He saw no conflict between his backing of the abolition of slavery and increasing European immigration because he believed that all people should be paid for their labor. Lincoln believed that the key to the nation's prosperity was labor that would be supplied by an infusion of European immigrants and that they would be drawn to the US because of the Homestead Acts' promises of attractive land in the west.34
Congress first responded to Lincoln's appeal by passing the Homestead Act on May 30, 1862. The act made citizens and intended citizens alike eligible, stating "any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States." The beneficiaries would each receive 160 acres of western public land if they made the land productive. In making property available not just to the native-born but also to foreign-born migrants, who merely expressed an intent to naturảlize, Congress intended to attract immigrants from overseas.
The requirement that eligible immigrants had to file an intent to naturalize excluded the Chinese and other non-white immigrants because the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to "free white persons" The Republican national platform in 1864 also extolled the virtues of immigration and endorsed a "liberal and just naturalization policy, which would encourage foreign immi-grants." The imperatives of preserving the Union and the northern economy and saving the territories and new states for free white labor eclipsed the Republican Party's initial nativist impulses. 35
Land reform was also what many African American southerners wanted, and Congress obliged by passing the Southern Homestead Act in 1867 to reinforce the 1862 Homestead law. Homesteading plans were central to Republicans' free labor beliefs, and federal land laws were featured in the par…

people as "equal participants in republican society"* Native Americans in the southeast lost their ability to stay in their territory because the white majority wanted Indian land to expand slavery, a goal that was shared by other states, the President, and the Congress.
The Removal Act of 1830 authorized President Jackson to trade land west of the Mississippi to Indians in exchange for their current land in the southeast and funded mass deportation. The executive branch already had the authority to conduct such an action, but the law secured funding. Expulsion of that many Indigenous people was beyond the Office of Indian Affairs' ordinary budget without additional funding. Thomas McKenney explained in 1828 that the office was using most of its funds for other things like food, clothing, and medicine for Indians' care. He suggested that Congress create funds "specifically, to defray the cost of the movement." The Removal Act of 1830 appropriated $500,000 for Indian deportation.35
The deportation of Native people of the five "Civilized Tribes" of the Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Cherokees in the 1830s required a scope and scale of financial and human resources that only the federal government could muster. The US government spent "about $75 million" to expel Native people; the equivalent amount today is "a trillion dollars." The money was not used to compensate Native people for their land or to facilitate their safe and comfortable travel. The federal funding was used to contract "with provi-sioners, steamboat captains, and other opportunistic Americans" in addition to
"purchasing munitions and supplies and mobilizing US troops and state militia to fight the seven-year war against Seminole families." The $75 million dollar price tag on Indian expulsion was close to the $80 million that the US government gained from selling Native lands which were then referred to as "public lands."36
As the US government flexed its administrative capacity, the mass …

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Racism is sometimes called the "original sin" of America and I think that's an apt metaphor here: when faced with the cognitive dissonance between the above and slaveholding, some founding fathers decided that this was actually rational if one group was subhuman.

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MIGRATION AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
"Victory in the War for Independence depended upon a united effort by thir teen colonies. What dictated the policy of men like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin was not an animus against Negroes, but a desire for strong national union in the effort against England"49 Horizontal federalism pressures, strategic
were doing, prevented wider inclusion of black soldiers.
competition, and awareness of the former colonies of what other former colonies By the Fall of 1775, some Black people were serving in New England units and Continental forces around Boston. General John Thomas, a brigade comman-der, said approvingly, "we have some Negros, but I look upon them as equally serviceable with other men ... many of them have proved themselves brave.
Despite the contributions of Black enlistees, newly arriving soldiers from slave. dominant former colonies objected to serving with Black recruits because they felt racially superior. One of the reasons New Englanders hesitated to draft Black forces more widely was out of consideration of "what the effect of the policy would have in other former colonies"5° The pressure to work together to defea the British led the northeastern areas to go along with the white supremads. demands from the south not to enlist more Black people or to place them in
non-combat positions.
Loud objections by the south temporarily precluded broader participation of Black people. After a British victory in Savannah in 1779 and as imperia forces threatened Charles Town, Washington's adviser John Laurens advised him to arm the enslaved if the revolutionaries were to have any chance to fight off the British. Laurens assured Washington if he could supply "3000 Black men" with guns from the Carolinas, he would be able to drive the British from Georgia and South Florida. Congress endorsed Laurens' plan and recommended that South Carolina and Georgia arm 3,000 Black men to be rewarded with $50 and freedom if they …

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This goes to the question: Who is an American? On paper, it is "we the people" who "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

static.klipy.com

Murica: Patriotic Bald Eagle Flexes

Alt: Patriotic Bald Eagle looking cool

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Major changes in judicial precedent, state pressure to exclude certain immigrants, and the desire to use federal power against Native American tribes changed all this in the late 1800s. But why is it important to understand something that happened in the Arthur administration?

This picture isn't in the book I just wanted you to appreciate The mad sideburns here.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Some states even cared for newcomers quite well; recognizing their value as people and important drivers of the local economy.

New York's Castle Garden Landing Depot
Castle Garden represents the most elaborate state migrant-serving institutions designed mostly for benevolent purposes. Although the federally-run Ellis Island is far better known, the Castle Garden depot was an entirely New York operation.
It processed over eight million migrants from 1855 to 1890, when two of every thre foreign-born people to the US passed through its gates.® Annual rent for the facility was $12,000. The total number of staff at Castle Garden and that of the Marine Hospital at Staten Island was seventy-six officers and employees. Their yearly salaries totaled $82,894.®9 From 1876 to 1882, the eve of the federalization of migration, New York state taxpayers spent over one million dollars for insti tutions to care for migrants.
7° The facility was run not as a detention station, but
as "a protective charity foundation" to provide "safety from swindlers and confidence men, a hospitable reception for newcomers, practical advice and social services*? In designing Castle Garden, New York City chose a non-restrictionist route to managing migrants.
The impetus for the creation of Castle Garden was New York's goal of protecting migrants from scammers. New York lawmakers had long known through its investigations that organized gangs of "runners" would descend upon arriving

HA
140 MIGRATION AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
a ban on state taxation of migrants even if these laws violated exclusive congres-
the Constitution.?
sional power to regulate interstate and international commerce as stipulated to The Passenger Cases, although not doctrinally dispositive because of the splin tered opinions, provided ample evidence of the strong motivations for states especially the slave states, to retain control over migration in both the nort east and south. The Court's very careful parsing of what constituted commerce and whether people or property were part of commerce is revealing. Construing people as "commerce" would have meant they would be subject to exclusive fed. eral congressional control and that position would be an anathema to slave and northeastern states. Thus, in their opinions, the proslavery justices argued tha ship passengers were "persons" and the antislavery justices argued they were
"commerce."
*5B California would try to impose taxes on the unwanted Chine immigrants after their arrival to skirt the Passenger Cases ruling which would be struck down by their state supreme court, illustrating the unsettled nature of federalism jurisprudence before the Civil War when courts struggled to draw a clean line between federal and state control over migration.
New York State Migration Institutions and Laws
In the nineteenth century, in addition to the northeastern states law siting poor, sick, and disabled people, the foreign arrivals also experienced a distinc tive kind of governmental power via institutions and procedures designed to care for them, not just to exclude and deport them. New York created a set of laws and institutions driven by merchants and industrialists. It was in these parties interest to see as many people landed as possible and they were not interested in exclusion. In "Protecting the Stranger: The Origins of Immigration Regulation in Nineteenth-Century New York," Brendan O'Malley reminds us that the total…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A standard history textbook says immigration policy started in the late 1800s. It is, after all, federal law, and that's when the first major federal immigration laws passed. But the author argues that actually in antebellum America states controlled immigration and didn't want federal inference.

terms for the security of this specie of property it was in our power to make Pickney knew that slave interests had created a national government that wa stronger but with safeguards that the federal government could not interfere with the institution of slavery and that no region of the nation would be more
powerful than another. ®8
Imperial federalism with a division of labor between a central and satellite governments survived the transfer to the US Constitution. The Americans were accustomed to dividing power in this way and expected to continue even as var-lous groups expectations of the federal government changed. The slave states did not oppose the creation of a strong national government during the Constitution's drafting. Quite the opposite. Southerners "often required some kind a action by the federal government."' For example, enslavers had no objection federal power being deployed to retrieve people leing for freedom from one state to another as stipulated by the fugitive slave clause/ If US power could be harnessed in the service of slavery, the South had no objection,
Pertinent to migration laws and policies, the upshot of the numerous accommodations for slavery was that the 1787 Constitution guaranteed that in the federal system, slavery remained under local management, at least until
1808. James Oakes observed that this "federal consensus" ensured that for more than seventy-five years, "hardly anybody-North or South, proslavery or antislavery-doubted that the Constitution put slavery in the states beyond the reach of federal power. The many ways this federal consensus would play out in migration laws and policies were reflected in a number of Supreme Court decisions that would uphold the constitutionality of state restrictions on undesirable populations' interstate and international movements. This federal consensus would also influence the national judiciary's assessment of states and localities' directives restricting the ability of free and enslav…

the term of service which Drotected European servants, most Africans imported under the headright system arriving after the 1660s were likely enslaved for life!
When the supply of European servants steeply declined by the 1690s, the importation of African people became key to those wanting to acquire land ünder the headright system in Virginia. Headright was technically available only for servants but the local practice in Virginia was to also award land for slave importations. Since planters dominated the Assembly and Council, the practice was continued for a generation. In one year alone, in 1690, planters secured over 95,000 acres of land in the Piedmont region based on the importation of 1,900 headright system until 1699. Local concentrations of political power, not lea enslaved Africans. England did not stop the importation of Africans under the
stipulations, drove headright practices.'
Tay avemotions fou o limited number of vears were also a recruitment tor as were material benefits such as focilities for surveying and plotting 15 In 1771.
North Carolina attempted to pass a law that would have granted new settlers four-vear tax-free period upon their arrival. but the Crown vetoed i+ 16 Colonies like Massachusetts and Marvland not only paid for the voyage of colonists. but also offered food, land, and tools/supplies for new arrivals," Other inland colonies like Georgia were even more generous offering to cover the "payment of transportation charges, a supply of tools and provisions until the first harvest, and land grants rent free for 10 years? "The variety of material incentives varied across the colonies and attracted migrants not only from abroad but also set offa considerable inter-colonial migration as the English colonies both on the main. land and in the West Indies used similar inducements to compete for migrants.
The indentured servitude trade would undergo changes in source countries of arrivals and competition between colonies, but material incentiv…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

🧵 This is one of the best histories I have read. Immigration law can charitably be described as held together with band-aids and glue- this book is like oh yeah and it we made it out of popsicle sticks. A few highlights: @unlawfulentries.bsky.social #booksky 💙📚 #histbookchat #LawSky

Cover of "Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship" by Anna O. Law

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

As an Eagles fan I can't like this but I'm happy for you personally.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Yikes you want to do what now? Math?!

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

New twist in the man vs. bear in the woods alone debate

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Me, sliding into a colleague's inbox with data at the same minute she emails me asking for the data.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

How does it use fewer tokens? Doesn't it have to download the file anyway?

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is fascinating. How do you use it? Like, how do you put in a picture and get a picture out? I'm not sure I get the readme.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

So if you don't suck you can get a gift that does. (Specifically a vacuum. )

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

11/ Very cool I did not know what Uhuru meant. Though DS9 is my favorite of the Trek series as it’s a little grittier. It still incorporates the wonder of exploration but not to the point of naïveté. Wow ironically TV execs almost dropped the ball until saved by Ball!

YOU ARE NOT SAFE IN SCIENCE
in which we consider going to space to escape ourselves
dom. As a Black physicist, I have been fed on both, and I have tried to grow the seeds that my ancestors passed on to me. The ancestors menld fv. I do too whenever I am able to escape into looking at the maverse throuch the lens of quantum fields. I am not the first to escape into the abstractions of space and time. If you've read this far, then you have joined me. We are not the first. We will not be the last.
When I was vounger. I knew I could be a scientist because I grew up watching LeVar Burton play one on television. As Geordi La Forge, chief engineer of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton gave us a brilliant, Black nerd. Because I saw this carly example, my child self never doubted that I had the freedom to be a professional nerd too. It was not a possibility that was, as it had been for Black generations before me, "Far Beyond the Stars"- the title of a powerful episode about twentieth-century anti-Black racism that aired during the sixth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. DS9, as many fans know it, was the first Trek series to feature a Black lead.
Avery Brooks's Benjamin Sisko broke barriers in what is to this day thelongest-running television drama with a Black man in the leading role. Like Burton's Lieutenant Commander La Forge, Captain Sisko taught Black children like me that not even the sky was the limit.
In this sense, representation has real material meaning: Trek has continuously pushed the boundaries of our imaginations for as long as it has existed. Burton's performance as Geordi La Forge has its
You Are Not safe In Science
origins in an earlier iteration of Trekathe froBlock perve Bur ton ever saw on television was Nichelle Nicholsa Lieutenant Noota Uhura in the original Star Trek series. This milestone was marked in the January 1967 issue of Ebony magazine, which also features a cover photograph of Nichols. In the photo, she's we…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

10/12 Amateur #astronomy photography fans, I found this section very helpful if you are thinking about doing this yourself.

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

9/12 Meaning of life question – why did we break the rule of acronyms when we already had this NICE acronym?

Cosmic Energy
273
Atmosphere
HYdrogen, Helium, Carbon
Outer Crust
Tons,Electroh」
inner crust ions Superflud Neutrons
Outer Core
upercon ducting Irotons Uknawn
Inner Core
ปกkกงพฤ
Figure 17.2. Here's a figure that shows what we think a neutron star is like in its exterior layers. The inner core is unknown.
that is attached to the International Space Station. The Neutron Star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER's mandate is to gather data about neutron stars that allow us to, among other things, deduce the mass and radius of individual stars. Each nuclear model of neutron star interiors makes a distinct prediction of what the relationship between the mass and radius will be; with measurements from NICER, we can rule out models that don't fit its observations.
I initially became interested in this work because the intense gravitational power of neutron stars' high density suggests that they might collect dark matter. This is an idea that my former PhD stu-dent, now Dr. Nathan Rutherford, has pursued under my direction, in collaboration with Professor Anna Watts and Dr. Geert Raaijma-kers at the University of Amsterdam. So far, what our work shows is that all NICER data is consistent with the presence of dark matter, but we have been unable to demonstrate that we can use mass-radius relation measurements of neutron stars to prove that dark matter is inside. What this means in practice is that all data analyses should consider the possibility that dark matter is present, but it's unlikely that this will be the technique that identifies dark matter's exact field-theoretic properties (such as mass and standard-model interactions).

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

8/12 I was thinking this the whole time and it’s casually mentioned in just a line. If a black hole a centimeter across has as much matter as the Earth, & they are very hard to see, & we can’t see inside them, isn’t that a more logical explanation for dark matter than invisible particles?

THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME
revived the possibility that there might be enough of them to explai
genuinely a dark absorber of light.
Ark matter Areaki this is the only dark-matter candidate that is To fa funar thing happened on the way to writing about dark matter for chapter 14. I started wondering how black holes fit into the way science communicators like me typically talk to the public abor the cosmic matter-energy pie chart. We usually show people some thing like Figure 14.1. On that chart, where do black holes belong?
This, it turns out, is not a straightforward question, Black holes aren't exactly matter or energy-we don't really know what's beyond the went horitan. Mavbe a mix of dark energy, dark matter, and vich. matter Or maybe black holes are dark matter themselves!
Asthe 2020s unfold, we are in an era of what Dr. Delilah Gates refers to in her dissertation as "the era of precision black hol imaging Using the circumference of the Earth as the aperture for a radio telescope, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has for the first time delivered images of the event horizons of two supermassive black holes. The first, the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87), was revealed in April 2019. In 2022, humanity was able to look at the edge of our own galaxy's interior, the event horizon of Sagittarius A*-aka Sgr A* (pronounced "SADGE-ay-star") - the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The images that we received, which you can see in Figure 15.1, exemplify the strong gravitational lensing I described earlier-and they look just like the computer simulations scientists had done for decades, based on theory alone.
Now; for the first time in the century since humans first started studying black holes, we are at a point where fundamental physical ideas about black holes are beginning to be tested with real data. As Daniel Harlow pointed out, we may not get to the point of fully testing our ideas, but we are increasingly able to make realistic state…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

7/12 Ooh I love Emmy Noether! Check out this book (and my review of it a few days ago) to learn more about this. I actually read both of these somewhat simultaneously and I felt like they helped me understand each other.

direction you rotate it in. Freamanns sotution also assumes the Copernican principle is correct, that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic on the largest scales. When I mentioned that idea in the last chapter, I didn't say it had anything to do with symmetries. But the universe looking the same no matter what direction we look in or what part we look at is a symmetrizing assumption that simplifies the equations a lot.
Symmetries can open doors. Mathematician Emmy Noether showed in the early twentieth century that the presence of certain types of symmetries arising in mathematical formulations of physical theories corresponded to conservation of observable physical phenomena like energy. Using Noether's theorem, we can make important connections. For instance, the theorem shows that there is a direct link between time-translation invariance—a symmetry of a system where the physics stays the same even if we change when we start measuring our time interval-and conservation of energy.
Absolute time isn't itself observable (or real, as you now know), but conservation of energy is directly observable. As a Jewish woman in early 1900s Germany, Noether ran into all kinds of social boundaries, yet her observation turned out to be one of the most important inall of twentieth-century physics. It helped provide insight into general relativity and eventually aided in the discovery and understanding of fundamental properties of particle physics.
Beyond Our Boundaries
Boundaries are often a good thing, but there are scenarios in which they are not. National and political borders are fictitious boundaries

Cover of Einstein‘s tutor: the story of Emmy Noether and the invention of modern physics by Lee Phillips

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

6/12 Though there are a few things that the book could have been explained better. For example, there’s a very detailed explanation about particle spin. But then they actually don’t spin? What?

THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME
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on the confirmation of your theory...?
experimental proof of directional quantization. We congratulate you card (pictured in Figure 82) telling him that he was right he
عبة/ عدم
Figure 8.2. The poster they se of Bor. On the left is the experimental outcome when the magnetic field is off —the particles randomly land along one line directly ahead of the detector. On the right is the outcome when the magnetic field is on —-they are deflected to two lines, one up and one down.
The lip shape comes from the fact that the magnetic field gets weaker farther away from its source, the magnets, which makes the lines bend together. A more constant magnetic field would produce two lines that never connect, one of spin-up particles and one of spin-down.
A Sequence of Peculiar Events
The results of the experiment were revolutionary, and also every. one involved initially misinterpreted them Only later did scientists understand that silver didn't have an outer electron with orbital angular momentum. So angular momentum had been detected, but not the kind that Stern and Gerlach thought. It wasn't until around 1926 that people understood what they had actually shown: Electrons have a quantum internal rotation that we now call spin. This spin doesn't manifest in the real world the same way a spinning figure skater does. Even so, it is real, with observational consequences, as Stern and Gerlach showed.
To really appreciate spin, it's useful to go back to the classical, Newtonian mechanistic picture of the world, and to our discussion of what we mean in classical physics when we talk about the "state
The Quantum Turn
of the system." Formally, the "state" of a system (such as a particle or a baseball) is given by two pleces of information: its position and as momentum. In classical Newtonian mechanics, both position and momentum are quantities that are simultaneously measured. Thes change with time. Think about what happened every time Brook In Dodpers star Jac…

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Lucia Walinchus @walinchus.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

5/12 Lastly, I love the attitude that science is about questions and not answers. Physics isn’t just a regurgitation of facts. It’s a complex field that we are now just scratching the surface of understanding.

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