@gravity_levity

"All who have passed the age of 30 are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance" -George Orwell

sites.google.com/view/skinner-physics/home
Joined September 2009
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Harvard. PEPFAR. LIGO. Basic science. And dozens of other crown jewels of not just the US, but of humanity. And one extremely corrupt man and his cronies and enablers are attempting to partly or totally destroy them
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Watching electronic ice melt | Science science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… I’m delighted to share a perspective I co-authored with Brian Skinner (@gravity_levity), highlighting an exciting new experiment that captures quantum melting in a disordered 2D Wigner solid.

Watching electronic ice melt

An experiment captures images of the transition between liquid and solid states of an electron system

science.org
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"Gut Biomes win championships" - Nico Harrison
Jovan Buha
@jovanbuha26 Apr 2025
JJ Redick said that Luka Doncic hasn’t been feeling well for 24 hours. He doesn’t think Doncic slept much last night. He was throwing up all afternoon going into the game. And Redick isn’t sure what caused the halftime delay to cause him not to start the second half.
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We’re celebrating #IYQ2025 with monthly #quantum science collections. March’s edition explores measurement-induced quantum phase transitions — where measurement competes with internal evolution, triggering a phase transition in entanglement structure. 🔗 go.aps.org/4iCyRPU
A graphic representing measurement-induced quantum phase transitions. A grid-like structure of blue rectangles symbolizes a quantum circuit or lattice. Black measurement symbols with white gauge-like needles appear at various points, indicating quantum measurements. Curved arrows in red, orange, and yellow trace different paths through the grid, suggesting the influence of measurements on quantum information flow. The color gradient of those paths represents a transition or probability flow, illustrating changes in entanglement due to measurements.

ALT A graphic representing measurement-induced quantum phase transitions. A grid-like structure of blue rectangles symbolizes a quantum circuit or lattice. Black measurement symbols with white gauge-like needles appear at various points, indicating quantum measurements. Curved arrows in red, orange, and yellow trace different paths through the grid, suggesting the influence of measurements on quantum information flow. The color gradient of those paths represents a transition or probability flow, illustrating changes in entanglement due to measurements.

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Replying to @InnaVishik
The utility of photovoltaics seems possible precisely because the science is so boring: it's the same p-n junction that we've had since the 1940s. The more interesting the science, the more skeptical one must be of claims of utility.
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the story of the Microsoft claim of topological qubits so far
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Brian Skinner retweeted
CWRU Physics@PhysicsCWRU3 Nov 2024
Join us TOMORROW, 11/4, at 12:45 pm in Foldy Room and Zoom for a condensed matter seminar! Brian Skinner (@gravity_levity) of @OSUPhysics will be speaking on "Johnson noise thermometry using ohmic and hydrodynamic electrons." #physics #condensedmatter @cwru @CWRUartsci
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Update: I plan to release a second edition of Plastic Fantastic by Kindle and Paperback through Amazon, correcting typos but otherwise not making changes. If you are or know a skilled typesetter available to help me reformat the cover art and manuscript please reach out.
Eugenie Reich@EugenieReich19 Aug 2024
Today the rights to publish Plastic Fantastic: How The Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook The Scientific World, originally published 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan concerning the fraud of Jan Hendrik Schon at Bell Labs, reverted to me the author. 🧵
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If anyone knows of an open access platform or printing service that they'd recommend for this kind of re-release let me know.
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Today the rights to publish Plastic Fantastic: How The Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook The Scientific World, originally published 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan concerning the fraud of Jan Hendrik Schon at Bell Labs, reverted to me the author. 🧵
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arXiv -> alphaXiv Students at Stanford have built alphaXiv, an open discussion forum for arXiv papers. @askalphaxiv You can post questions and comments directly on top of any arXiv paper by changing arXiv to alphaXiv in any URL!
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Brian Skinner retweeted
Zhigang Suo@zhigangsuo12 Jul 2024
Today a US Circuit Court of Appeals acquits Franklin Tao. The case virtually bankrupted Tao’s family and led to his firing. scmp.com/news/world/united-s…
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Freeman Dyson takes no prisoners
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"For valuable quantum computing, all that’s needed is a user base that demands to use quantum computers for some application – even if it’s possible to do it using regular computers." To make money, all you need is to convince people to use quantum, even if they don't need it.
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Brian Skinner retweeted
David Keith@DKeithClimate4 Jul 2024
Koodos to Dan Visioni @DanVisioni for his sharp defense of outdoor solar geoengineering experiments in Technology Review @techreview (April 2024) technologyreview.com/2024/04…

Why new proposals to restrict geoengineering are misguided

We need more research, including outdoor experiments, to make better-informed decisions about such climate interventions.

technologyreview.com
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Replying to @gravity_levity
But every once in a while when you find a cool rock another nearby street light suddenly turns on
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Theorists especially work in fields defined as interesting by consensus. There's an obvious upside and downside: the wisdom of crowds may mean that this is a productive place to work, but there is also the risk of groupthink when that turns out to be false
Brian Skinner@gravity_levity26 Jun 2024
1/2 Since my name is being invoked I guess I should give my view of Alexey's claim that "most physicists are not doing physics". I agree that most physicists (myself included) are not primarily engaged in the business of trying to find new truths about the physical universe.
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babe, is everything ok? you've started your talk and you didn't even mention that in the 1982 Feynman said that "Nature is
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Replying to @qgp07
Completely agree: it's very valuable to have an expansion that feels like magic and an explanation that feels boring and to be able to show that they are equivalent
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Brian Skinner retweeted
Orwell2024@orwell202219 May 2024
1956, J. M. Lifshitz calculated the force between opposing dielectric blocks with plane-parallel surfaces. Specializing in two perfectly conducting metal plates, he obtained Casimir's result. Thus, the Casimir effect can be explained without reference to vacuum fluctuations.@skdh
Brian Skinner@gravity_levity19 May 2024
Periodic reminder that the mysterious-seeming Casimir effect is completely equivalent to the fairly-intuitive van der Waals interaction (which actually generalizes it). No need to treat it as a mystical property of the vacuum rather than as a simple interaction between matter.
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