Nicholas Sedlmayr
@ndsedlmayr.bsky.social
Theoretical Physicist, Music Obsessive, Curmudgeon
https://nicholas-sedlmayr.com
https://nicholas-sedlmayr.com
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
This is obviously SO low stakes, but it genuinely annoys me that we teach kids "tomatoes are a fruit, NOT a vegetable" rather than "vegetable is a culinary category that includes MANY items that are technically fruits, including tomatoes, peppers, green beans, and all different kinds of squash."
June 18, 2025 at 1:05 AM
This is obviously SO low stakes, but it genuinely annoys me that we teach kids "tomatoes are a fruit, NOT a vegetable" rather than "vegetable is a culinary category that includes MANY items that are technically fruits, including tomatoes, peppers, green beans, and all different kinds of squash."
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Even putting the moral arguments aside, this idea of customising your baby is a fantasy, scientifically speaking, though I'm sure some people will pay for it...
June 5, 2025 at 10:13 AM
Even putting the moral arguments aside, this idea of customising your baby is a fantasy, scientifically speaking, though I'm sure some people will pay for it...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing *identical* journal names, and likely similar business model.
What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it?
A 🧵
the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...
What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it?
A 🧵
the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...
Springer Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing
Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro
the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io
June 15, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing *identical* journal names, and likely similar business model.
What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it?
A 🧵
the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...
What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it?
A 🧵
the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
I think we should be more open about making fun of people who do this stuff.
June 12, 2025 at 4:25 AM
I think we should be more open about making fun of people who do this stuff.
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
"IONQ CEO Niccolo de Masi sells $103 million in stock. SEC filing confirms full liquidation. Investors question timing. Pump-and-dump concerns rise."
citizenwatchreport.com/ionq-ceo-nic...
citizenwatchreport.com/ionq-ceo-nic...
June 12, 2025 at 6:18 AM
"IONQ CEO Niccolo de Masi sells $103 million in stock. SEC filing confirms full liquidation. Investors question timing. Pump-and-dump concerns rise."
citizenwatchreport.com/ionq-ceo-nic...
citizenwatchreport.com/ionq-ceo-nic...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Sam Altman wrote a blog post to tell us that he doesn't understand human creativity, technology, science, politics, history, ethics, or even his own AI. He does, however, have some grasp of marketing.
blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-s...
blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-s...
The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.
Robots...
blog.samaltman.com
June 11, 2025 at 6:32 AM
Sam Altman wrote a blog post to tell us that he doesn't understand human creativity, technology, science, politics, history, ethics, or even his own AI. He does, however, have some grasp of marketing.
blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-s...
blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-s...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Breaking: The muon discrepancy seems to be officially gone. The Muon g–2 experiment at @fermilab.bsky.social
has just announced its final magnetic moment of the muon, improving precision by 1.8x. This is now in agreement with updated calculations published last week by the Theory Initiative ...🧵
has just announced its final magnetic moment of the muon, improving precision by 1.8x. This is now in agreement with updated calculations published last week by the Theory Initiative ...🧵
June 3, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Breaking: The muon discrepancy seems to be officially gone. The Muon g–2 experiment at @fermilab.bsky.social
has just announced its final magnetic moment of the muon, improving precision by 1.8x. This is now in agreement with updated calculations published last week by the Theory Initiative ...🧵
has just announced its final magnetic moment of the muon, improving precision by 1.8x. This is now in agreement with updated calculations published last week by the Theory Initiative ...🧵
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
🧪⚛️ This looks interesting. 9-sigma discrepancies in comparatively simple systems don't happen very often. To my more knowledgable AMO colleagues: It seems like a true spin-dependent anomaly would show up in lots of places. Any other hints of something like this? physics.aps.org/articles/v18...
Precision Spectroscopy Reaffirms Gap Between Theory and Experiment
New physics may explain discrepant values for the ionization energy of a metastable state of helium.
physics.aps.org
June 3, 2025 at 6:39 PM
🧪⚛️ This looks interesting. 9-sigma discrepancies in comparatively simple systems don't happen very often. To my more knowledgable AMO colleagues: It seems like a true spin-dependent anomaly would show up in lots of places. Any other hints of something like this? physics.aps.org/articles/v18...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Amazing account of ChatGPT's sycophancy and confabulation on steroids.
amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...
amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...
Diabolus Ex Machina
This Is Not An Essay
amandaguinzburg.substack.com
June 4, 2025 at 3:02 AM
Amazing account of ChatGPT's sycophancy and confabulation on steroids.
amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...
amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Every book / paper should start like this...
"I write these words, believing that I have always lived in one world: and that it is the same world in which my family, friends, historical figures, all humankind, including you, dear reader, live or have lived or will live."
arxiv.org/abs/2505.23639
"I write these words, believing that I have always lived in one world: and that it is the same world in which my family, friends, historical figures, all humankind, including you, dear reader, live or have lived or will live."
arxiv.org/abs/2505.23639
The Multiverse: a Philosophical Introduction
This book is a philosopher's introduction to the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. I present and assess three versions of the idea: one version from philosophy, and two from physic...
arxiv.org
May 30, 2025 at 7:39 AM
Every book / paper should start like this...
"I write these words, believing that I have always lived in one world: and that it is the same world in which my family, friends, historical figures, all humankind, including you, dear reader, live or have lived or will live."
arxiv.org/abs/2505.23639
"I write these words, believing that I have always lived in one world: and that it is the same world in which my family, friends, historical figures, all humankind, including you, dear reader, live or have lived or will live."
arxiv.org/abs/2505.23639
Will We Ever Prove String Theory? www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpr...
Will We Ever Prove String Theory?
No. If you want to hear Cumrun Vafa’s latest “predictions of string theory”, there’s a podcast at Quanta magazine you could listen to. Over the years, Vafa has promoted vari…
www.math.columbia.edu
May 30, 2025 at 6:59 AM
Will We Ever Prove String Theory? www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpr...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
There is no "science-wide replication crisis" because every word in that phrase carries unfounded assumptions. 🧵
1. There is no evidence that progress has generally stalled in the sciences. Also, no one has actually tried to estimate replicability across fields.
1. There is no evidence that progress has generally stalled in the sciences. Also, no one has actually tried to estimate replicability across fields.
May 27, 2025 at 9:31 PM
There is no "science-wide replication crisis" because every word in that phrase carries unfounded assumptions. 🧵
1. There is no evidence that progress has generally stalled in the sciences. Also, no one has actually tried to estimate replicability across fields.
1. There is no evidence that progress has generally stalled in the sciences. Also, no one has actually tried to estimate replicability across fields.
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
"In extremely rare move, Harvard revokes tenure and cuts ties with star business professor" Francesca Gino
In extremely rare move, Harvard revokes tenure and cuts ties with star business professor
An internal investigation had found that Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino’s research on why people lie and cheat was based on falsified data.
www.wgbh.org
May 25, 2025 at 9:08 PM
"In extremely rare move, Harvard revokes tenure and cuts ties with star business professor" Francesca Gino
Dead Stars Don’t Radiate johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2025/05/17/d...
Dead Stars Don’t Radiate
Three guys claim that any heavy chunk of matter emits Hawking radiation, even if it’s not a black hole: • Michael F. Wondrak, Walter D. van Suijlekom and Heino Falcke, Gravitational pair…
johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com
May 19, 2025 at 6:50 AM
Dead Stars Don’t Radiate johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2025/05/17/d...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
QUOTE OF THE DAY
May 18, 2025 at 8:21 PM
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
I started looking at this paper that appeared on arxiv, but now I suspect it's entirely AI-generated. (Author has no internet footprint, no acknowledgments, email points to an AI company...) Another thing to worry about.
arxiv.org/abs/2505.06673
Apologies to the author if they are actually human!
arxiv.org/abs/2505.06673
Apologies to the author if they are actually human!
Observer-Specific Universes: A Bayesian Framework for Resolving Cosmological Naturalness Problems
Naturalness problems such as the hierarchy problem and the origin of dark energy remain significant challenges in modern cosmology. This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework where each obs...
arxiv.org
May 15, 2025 at 4:42 PM
I started looking at this paper that appeared on arxiv, but now I suspect it's entirely AI-generated. (Author has no internet footprint, no acknowledgments, email points to an AI company...) Another thing to worry about.
arxiv.org/abs/2505.06673
Apologies to the author if they are actually human!
arxiv.org/abs/2505.06673
Apologies to the author if they are actually human!
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Carlo Rovelli is always worth reading. But I find the framing of this piece questioning the need for "new physics" a little strange. I support the impulse to avoid fishing speculative new theories out of the air, but Carlo is using it here to support his own... /1
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Why bad philosophy is stopping progress in physics
Theoretical physicists are in thrall to a misguided mindset that allows viable ideas to be advanced only by overturning what already exists.
www.nature.com
May 14, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Carlo Rovelli is always worth reading. But I find the framing of this piece questioning the need for "new physics" a little strange. I support the impulse to avoid fishing speculative new theories out of the air, but Carlo is using it here to support his own... /1
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Me to D just now: "Repeat after me: categories aren't real. You just need to know where everything is."
May 13, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Me to D just now: "Repeat after me: categories aren't real. You just need to know where everything is."
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
This is why they can't fix it: it's not broken
It's *structurally indifferent to truth*
It's *structurally indifferent to truth*
Again, @ft.com reporters or whoever else needs to hear this:
"Hallucinations" are not the result of "flaws," they are literally inherent in & inextricable from what LLM systems do & are.
Whether an "AI" tells you something that matches reality or something that doesn't, *it is working as designed*
"Hallucinations" are not the result of "flaws," they are literally inherent in & inextricable from what LLM systems do & are.
Whether an "AI" tells you something that matches reality or something that doesn't, *it is working as designed*
May 14, 2025 at 5:42 AM
This is why they can't fix it: it's not broken
It's *structurally indifferent to truth*
It's *structurally indifferent to truth*
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
Work relating to Microsoft’s new quantum computing chip has been called into question after an author on the 2017 study acknowledged it contained “undisclosed data manipulations,” according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch and Science. scim.ag/42Z6Vz2
‘Data manipulations’ alleged in study that paved the way for Microsoft’s quantum chip
Internal emails from 2021 reveal tensions among researchers hunting for elusive Majorana particle
scim.ag
May 7, 2025 at 1:43 PM
Work relating to Microsoft’s new quantum computing chip has been called into question after an author on the 2017 study acknowledged it contained “undisclosed data manipulations,” according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch and Science. scim.ag/42Z6Vz2
Reposted by Nicholas Sedlmayr
This is sort of consistent with my hazy intuition that "functional specialization" hypotheses are probably too strong. I kind of feel like maybe the brain is just a giant, reverberating liquid state machine: everything is (on some level) causally integrated with everything else.
New results! Neural subspaces are not specialized. They are like general workspaces.
Recycling of prefrontal subspaces dynamically multiplexes information
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
#neuroscience
Recycling of prefrontal subspaces dynamically multiplexes information
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
#neuroscience
Recycling of prefrontal subspaces dynamically multiplexes information
Cortical spiking activity in areas like prefrontal cortex (PFC) encodes information only along a small number of dimensions, a subspace of the full space of population activity patterns. PFC often use...
doi.org
May 5, 2025 at 1:52 PM
This is sort of consistent with my hazy intuition that "functional specialization" hypotheses are probably too strong. I kind of feel like maybe the brain is just a giant, reverberating liquid state machine: everything is (on some level) causally integrated with everything else.