Nick @internic@qoto.org

New job and new place means new #introduction post!

Hi, I'm Doro!
I'm a #Physics PostDoc at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics near #Munich, Germany! I play with ultracold atoms in lattices of laser light to simulate other quantum systems!
I'm also a fan of open source software (#FOSS), #Linux, and I code in #python for work and for fun!
I love SciFi in all forms, especially #StarTrek and #DoctorWho.
No tolerance for discrimination of any kind.

This, but with chemistry instead of physics.

Has the literature prize been announced yet?

From my new essay about America’s abuse cycle at the hands of toxic political party-parents…

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/wait-til-daddy-gets-home-americas

“We can build the web we want to see.” @molly0xfff kicked off XOXO 2024's conference with a hopeful talk about building Web3 Is Going Just Great, and how we can “push the web back towards the wonderful, joyful, beautiful place it used to be.” https://xoxofest.com/2024/videos/molly-white

In 1596, Kepler claimed that the planetary orbits would only follow "God's design" if there were two more planets: one between Mars and Jupiter and one between Mercury and Venus. Later folks came up with the Titius-Bode rule. This says there should be a planet whose orbital radius is

0.4 + 0.3 × 2ⁿ

times the distance between the Earth and Sun.

• For n = 0 we get Venus.
• For n = 1 we get Earth.
• For n = 2 we get Mars.
• For n = 3 we get... NOTHING???
• For n = 4 we get Jupiter.
• For n = 5 we get Saturn.
• For n = 6, this rule correctly predicted the location of another planet: Uranus.

So, 24 astronomers called the "celestial police" looked between Mars and Jupiter. And in 1801 one of them found a small object in the right place! Later people found other asteroids in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, but the first was the biggest: Ceres.

In 2015 we sent a probe called Dawn to investigate Ceres. It found something wonderful.

The surface of Ceres is a mix of ice and hydrated minerals like carbonates and CLAY! It probably doesn't have an internal ocean of liquid water like Jupiter's moon Europa. But it seems that brine still flows through its outer mantle and reaches the surface!

A new paper argues that Ceres contains a 𝑙𝑜𝑡 of ice, and was once an ocean-covered world:

"We think that there's lots of water-ice near Ceres surface.... People used to think that if Ceres was very icy, the craters would deform quickly over time, like glaciers flowing on Earth, or like gooey flowing honey. However, we've shown through our simulations that ice can be much stronger in conditions on Ceres than previously predicted if you mix in just a little bit of solid rock.""

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-asteroid-ceres-ocean-world-slowly.html

Astronomers found evidence for a long-theorized mechanism that helps forming stars to grow by drawing material from the surrounding disk - magnetized disk winds. These winds remove angular momentum and thus allow material to reach smaller radii

https://www.mpia.de/news/science/2024-13-jwst-disk-wind

📣 Science Job Opportunity 📣

Postdoctoral positions available in gravitational-wave physics and astrophysics at the @mpi_grav in Potsdam. Join our thriving research environment and work on cutting-edge projects in gravitational-wave astronomy, numerical relativity, and astrophysics. Apply now!

👉 https://www.aei.mpg.de/1183887/acr-postdoc-2025

#GravitationalPhysics #PostdocPositions #MaxPlanckInstitute

💔 So I have an alert set with ADS that sends me the list of papers that cite my papers every week.

And this week ... I read the name of the first author of one of them and swallow. Didn't that person ...?

Yeah, they died this January. There is a little star next to their name in the author list and in the footnotes a "deceased".

The paper was submitted in April. Their colleagues clearly finished the work for them and kept them as the first author.

#astrodon #academia

I have a new book out! You should read it!

Also, I AM COMING TO NEW YORK OCT 11-16TH!

Am I reading from #SpaceOddity? YES!

Have I not been to NYC in a super long time & really want to see my friends & colleagues? ALSO YES.

If you’re in the city, come to the reading on the 15th & also contact me so we can arrange time to hang out!

https://amzn.to/47Vk0LM

GEICO confirms it's notifying Tesla Cybertruck owners their insurance policies for the vehicle will be terminated. https://www.torquenews.com/11826/geico-terminating-insurance-coverage-tesla-cybertrucks-says-type-vehicle-doesnt-meet-our

Meanwhile, on Twitter/X…

Ok, I might as well start posting. I’ve been finding my way around Mastodon and who to follow. But apart from a few people, many interesting people seem to have joined a year or so ago but then haven’t posted anything for months. Do people come to Mastodon from that other place and then find it less exciting or not as straightforward to use?

I enjoy following SF writers here because they're always on the lookout for cool ideas. Greg Egan (@gregeganSF), Bruce Sterling (@bruces), Charlie Stross (@cstross) and Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) are my faves.

For example, Sterling just pointed out the idea of a 'wastebasket taxon'. When biologists are trying to classify forms of life, this is a group they invent just to put organisms that don't fit anywhere else.

Pretty pathetic, eh? It's like how I have a desk drawer where I stick all the shit that I can't figure out where it goes.

There may still be a few wastebasket taxa in use, like the one containing miscellaneous long-necked dinosaurs. But luckily most of them listed on Wikipedia are no longer in use.

For example:

"Vermes is an obsolete taxon of worm-like animals. It was a catch-all term used by Carl Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for non-arthropod invertebrate animals."

Or this:

"The order Insectivora has traditionally been used as a dumping ground for placental insectivorous mammals (and similar forms such as colugos). While the core components (moles, shrews, hedgehogs and their close relations) do in fact form a consistent clade, Eulipotyphla, other mammals historically placed in the order have been found to belong to other branches of the placental tree: tree shrews and colugos are euarchontans related to primates and sometimes grouped in Sundatheria, while tenrecs, golden moles and elephant shrews are all afrotheres."

I love stuff like this - now I get to learn about colugos! Ever seen one? If you're sick of doomscrolling, I recommend checking out Wikipedia pages about biology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wastebasket_taxon

@BartoszMilewski wrote: "My understanding is that the vacuum described by LQG is not Lorentz invariant."

That's not right. I worked on loop quantum gravity for 10 years and I still keep up with it somewhat. The problem is that even today, nobody understands loop quantum gravity well enough to have a fucking clue what the "vacuum" might be like. Also nobody knows how the Lorentz group would act on states, so we can't say whether any state would or would not be Lorentz invariant.

The whole concept of "vacuum state", i.e. lowest-energy state, is hard to define in nonperturbative quantum gravity, because we don't start out assuming the Poincare group acts on physical states. In perturbative quantum gravity you assume you've got gravitons moving around on Minkowski spacetime, like little ripples in an otherwise flat world. This gives you a Poincare group representation on a Fock space for free gravitons. Then you try to turn on the interactions and you discover the theory is nonrenormalizable.

Loop quantum gravity is a nonperturbative approach that starts with Einstein's equations and tries to quantize them. No Minkowski spacetime or Poincare group in sight. Then you try to show that some states act approximately like classical solutions of GR. But there are huge obstacles to getting anywhere close to that. So nobody is at all close to saying whether the theory has some sort of 'vacuum'-like state that is or is not Lorentz invariant.

This "scientific" article from Sony CSL about 15 min cities has been making the rounds in the news those past few weeks, and uhhh

As far as I can tell it's really bad research? It's based on OSM data without trying to compensate for disparity in coverage. It's based on some weird definition of urban areas that in some cases include several acres of uninhabited mountains, which reduce city averages. Basic mistakes.

https://csl.sony.it/project/the-15-minutes-city/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.03794

The next Nobel in Physics will be announced on Tuesday. Clarivate Analytics, the data analysis company, suggests the time for quantum computing has arrived and is saying that David Deutsch and Peter Shor could be the winners.

Curiously, although with fewer options, there's one Spanish physicist, Juan Ignacio Cirac, winner of the Wolf Prize, that appears among the favourites, also for his contributions in quantum computing.

Even if it's not the time of Cirac, there's another Spanish guy, Pedro Jarillo-Herrero, who was one of the discoverers of the magic angle of the graphene (that the graphene turns out to be a superconductor if you rotate 2 flat surfaces 1.1°).

Spain has never won a Nobel in Physics or Chemistry, and the scientific community here is longing for one. Even although Cirac and Jarillo-Herrero work outside (Germany and the US, respectively), if any of them wins, this could launch the science in Spain, with more support for research, more reasonable evalutions of merits and better conditions for young scientists. One can always dream.

#physics

I'm the opposite. I could never understand how you could have Lorentz invariance if you discretize spacetime. It might emerge as an approximate symmetry at larger scales, when individual violations average out because of the randomness of the lattice.

I see QLG mostly as a regularization scheme that gets rid of infinities by providing a short-distance cutoff. But this cutoff cannot be Lorentz invariant, as Sabine points out. I can't see a way out of it.

Google keeps getting worse. Here are alternative search engines and how they work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-is-a-monopoly-should-you-use-another-search-engine/

I'm curious -- has anyone used a static site generator with really good backwards compatibility? (ideally over 5+ years)

I use (and love) Hugo but I've decided keep using a release from 2018 forever because it seems like there have been a lot of backwards incompatible changes since then and I don't feel like doing the work to upgrade

(edit: from the responses it seems like lots of people have found Jekyll to be very stable, especially with github pages. Also maybe eleventy.)