4 gravitons

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Stories about physics from someone who's been there

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It Got to My Field
Sep 25, 2026 · original
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. The post turned out to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, after some folks at Anthropic read it and decided to tackle one of the outstanding problems I mentioned. They then invited me to write a post about it on their science blog. The post is here . I recommend reading it, then coming back. The rest of this post will be a little Q&A. Q: At the end of that post, it says Anthropic paid you for your time. Can we trust what you wrote? A: When I agreed to write the post, I made it clear that I was going to give my own opinion, no
Data Comes From Papers
Sep 18, 2026 · original
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 ( ), electrons ( ) or gluons and find the best info experiments have provided on properties like their mass and charge. It’s a great place to get an authoritative number for any particle physics property you’re interested in. Of course, scientists don’t just accept one authoritative answer for anything, even whether Pluto is a planet . That’s why each measurement in PDGLive comes with an arrow you can expand to see a table of past measurements, which you can compare to. Each measurement comes with a link to a source. And each source is not an experiment webpage, or some e
Everybody Who Isn’t ”Viewers Like You”
Sep 11, 2026 · original
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. So who pays for educational kids’ shows on public television? If you’re from the US and watched PBS growing up, you remember one answer: “viewers like you!” US public television is supported by donations, ordinary people across the country who want it to keep on educating kids. But you also might remember the lists of names that came before “viewers like you”. Some of those were things like “the Department of Education” or “a grant from the National Science Foundation”: government programs, in oth
Paying the Truthseekers
Sep 4, 2026 · original
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 differences mostly come in how you’re paid. You could imagine some sort of pure truthseeker, paid purely by how well they tell the truth. People would ask them to find out the truth about something, and pay them for the service. And the truthseekers with the best track record would get the most clients. But neither profession really works like this. Journalism comes closest. Once upon a time, people bought newspapers in order to be the first to know when something important happened. While there’s still a little bit of that going on (I guess this is what Bloomb
Don’t Judge an Explanation by Its Cover
Aug 28, 2026 · original
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. If you can’t explain the movements of stars based on the matter you can see, then proposing invisible matter sounds like the easy way out. But it’s actually a lot less easy than it sounds, because matter is something quite specific. Matter gravitates and bends light. Matter moves. Matter can be described with a pressure, one like gas and dust and not like other things like light or the Higgs field. If you propose a new type of matter, you have to check and see that all of those consequences hold, with detailed implica
Newsworthiness Guide for Scientists
Aug 21, 2026 · original
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’ve got a better one now, though I’m afraid it doesn’t fit in an elevator pitch. This is all based on my experience, so take it with a grain of salt. But here are the criteria that seem to matter: First, a story usually needs a news hook . News is, in particular, supposed to be “new”. That doesn’t mean I can’t write about history, or established science. But editors like those stories a lot better if there is some recent development, within the past year or so, to tie it to. The new development doesn’t have to be all that important, the story can mostly focu
Better Bounds
Aug 14, 2026 · original
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. But out of six hundred or so fruitless tries, one attempt did prove a new bound. Previously, mathematicians had been able to prove that at least 41.6% of the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function satisfied the Riemann hypothesis. Now, the new proof shows that at least 67.2% satisfy it. Anthropic’s press release is impressively careful. As someone who’s had to think about how to write content that both excites the public and doesn’t piss off experts too much, they do an admirable job walking that line. They even say, straight-o
It Only Counts When AI Gets to My Field
Aug 7, 2026 · original
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. Other scientists and mathematicians could argue that nothing like that existed in their field, so a similar success was unlikely. But LLMs can now navigate scientific literature, and loosely imitate the reasoning process of a mathematical proof. And increasingly, the math and computer science results coming out of AI labs are ones that humans find impressive. Now, experts argue about how far AI can really go. Will AI mathematics only be good at finding counterexamples and solving cute puzzles, not introducing new concepts
Bonus Info on Dark Energy and Muons
Jul 31, 2026 · original
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. But a small group has been hammering at the consensus. Long-time followers of this blog have already heard of these folks. I criticized news coverage around a paper with one of the authors, Subir Sarkar, back in 2016 , when he was only arguing that the supernova evidence was insufficient to establish dark energy, not that it was literally the wrong way around. He and his co-authors wanted an opportunity to state their case, so I posted their response a few weeks later . Later, I got to know Rameez,
Quantum Apologetics and Quantum Theology
Jul 24, 2026 · original
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 apologetics : arguments designed to convince people on the outside. The rest work within a particular religion, working out its implications. There’s a similar, less-often-noticed behavior when it comes to interpretations of quantum mechanics. Much like religions, there are many different interpretations of quantum mechanics, from people who envision a fundamentally undetermined world to those who picture a vast multiverse of all possibilities

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