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Dulwich Quantum Computing @dulwichquantum.bsky.social · 2d

Live footage of Nobel committee giving the Physics prize to quantum computing.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · 3d

It's because we're all sick of Trump and immediately scroll away whenever his face appears

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · 5d

Measurement is a classical process by definition (even in quantum mechanics), so I can only conclude that a "quantum measurement" is a normal measurement that has gone through a marketing transformation

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · 10d

They'll sing a different tune when I've published my brilliant and deeply moving debut novel: Bill Dung's Roman Adventure

gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · 10d

It was like getting a preview of what the adult mind must be like, and I wasn't sure I liked it but I couldn't look away.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · 10d

My parents had a bunch of these collections, and as a kid in the early 90s I read them with a kind of perverse fascination. There were clearly points of appeal to kids, but the focus was squarely on "adult themes" (risque, political, banal).

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Reposted

Dulwich Quantum Computing @dulwichquantum.bsky.social · 12d

Promo video for the recent HSBC and IBM Quantum breakthrough in finance, if it was directed by Scott Aaronson.
scottaaronson.blog?p=9170

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Reposted

McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 15d

"Just as Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic larger-than-life figure driven to accumulate wealth at all costs in a futile bid for the love of Daisy Buchanan, the Xerox 914 beats on ceaselessly, printing page after page, for reasons that readers cannot fully comprehend."

Book Review: The Great Gatsby by the Xerox 914 Photocopier

Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the wa...

buff.ly

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · 22d

South Carolina

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · 28d

that was true before this tweet

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 9

I've been doing some percolation calculations lately, and I decided that I was tired of letting my computer have all the fun

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Reposted

World Conferences on Research Integrity @wcrifoundation.bsky.social · Sep 8

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia

#AI #GenAI #HigherEducation #ResearchIntegrity #WCRI2026 #WCRI

www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/cognitive-...

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia

A new paper calls on academia to repel rampant AI in university departments and classrooms.

www.bloodinthemachine.com

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

Good correction, which shows that I misremembered / omitted some context in my summary.
Weiss came up with the idea of an optical interferometric gravitational wave detector, which eventually became LIGO.

Much better to read his summary of what happened than mine:
www.kavliprize.org/rainer-weiss...

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

As someone who is never able to maintain focus on a single problem for more than a year or so, I'm so glad there are people like this in science.

(And of course I worry that the modern culture and pace of science is pushing them out)

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

Just found this longer, and much better telling of the story: www.kavliprize.org/rainer-weiss...

Looks like I mostly remembered things correctly, but the full story is much better than my telling.

Rainer Weiss life story

www.kavliprize.org

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

10/10 "Wait, could you actually detect a relative change in distance of order one part in 10^20?" He spent all summer thinking about it.

And that was the beginning of his obsession. It took 48 years from that moment to the first actual detection of a gravitational wave.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

9/ The point of the problem was to show that there is a relative change in distance between the masses less than one part in 10^20, and you go "ahh, got it, the effect is negligible" and you move on.

But during the summer after the class ended, the problem stuck with him and kept bothering him.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

8/ It was a simple homework exercise, and he showed it as part of the colloquium: the solution takes less than a page, and he claims that everyone in the class was able to solve it correctly.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

7/ At one point he conceived of a homework problem that would make the point to his students that dynamical effects in GR are extremely weak. So he designed a little problem where you imagine two free masses passing light back and forth to each other as a gravitational wave passes by.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

6/ He was assigned to teach the General Relativity course, which at the time was in the Engineering department because no one in Physics wanted to teach it. But Waiss (in his description) didn't know any relativity. So he struggled all semester to stay "at best one day ahead of my students".

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

5/ Weiss finished his PhD, bounced around as an instructor a bit, and eventually managed to get a junior faculty position at MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

4/ Shortly thereafter he convinced an MIT professor (Zacharias) to let him work as a lab tech. After a couple years in his lab, Prof. Zacharias managed to successfully lobby to get him accepted into the PhD program.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

3/ So he went to MIT to study electrical engineering. Along the way he got a girlfriend at the University of Chicago. He figured that he could live in Chicago with her and return to MIT only when he needed to take exams.

This plan didn't go well, he failed his classes, and he dropped out of college

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

2/ He told the story of how he came to be obsessed with gravitational waves. I'll do my best to recap that story, as best I can recall.

It started with him getting obsessed with radios in high school. The fact that invisible waves could carry beautiful music through the air was captivating.

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gravity-levity.bsky.social @gravity-levity.bsky.social · Sep 8

1/ Rainer Weiss, who conceived of the idea of a gravitational wave detector (which eventually became LIGO), has died.

I was at MIT when the first gravitational wave detection was announced, and he gave perhaps the most inspiring colloquium I have ever heard.

news.mit.edu/2025/profess...

Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, influential physicist who forged new paths to understanding the universe, dies at 92

MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, a renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose groundbreaking work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed a longst...

news.mit.edu

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