I love flowers, especially fields of them. This is Olga Wisinger-Florian's Blooming Poppies, ca. 1895-1900, Oil on Cardboard, 70 x 98 cm, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria

Canvas H/T: @APainting_ADay on Twitter, Belvedere from my visit in 2017.

The President's 2026 NSF budget request: nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

Overall cut: 55%

MPS directorate cut: $1B+

Expected # awards: 2300, down from 9600

Expected acceptance rate: 7%, down from 26%

Expected # of supported PhD students: 12400, down from 41500

🧪⚛️

Here's a poster ready to be a paper.

Facing a bimodal skyline…

I had a look at the paper: doi.org/10.1038/s418... and the MIT press release: news.mit.edu/2025/study-c.... This isn't just on the journalists. I mean, the authors say "the sky is quite literally falling". Nowhere in the abstract or MIT news piece they mention the orders of magnitude difference 🤦🏻‍♂️

Thank you @maxplanck.de!

#StandUpForScience
🧪⚛️

Are we witnessing the unveiling of MSFT topocon?

I had an unhelpful exchange with the VP, who of course has no time to engage with substantial criticism of their previous work. Instead, he spends his time spreading misleading or false information on LinkedIn.

🧪⚛️

Here is how it's going on LinkedIn: they have no time for engaging.

Attending 𝘛𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘘𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘮 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳: 𝘍𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 to deliver lectures on 𝗧𝗼𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗶𝘂𝗺 𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗤𝘂𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗺 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 thanks to UNAM's generous hospitality. The event was formally inaugurated yesterday with full day of talks and posters.

sites.google.com/quimica.unam...

Looks like Feynman diagrams are now used for college football to figure out the path/route integral of winning.

How many blocks are there in this sculpture? (National Gallery of Arts Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.)

"If you publish them without such a theory … they will only be thrown into the heap of observations of former astronomers." — Isaac Newton to Flamsteed on Jan 7, 1694, pressing to obtain observations of the moon to use for his theory of lunar motion.

🧪 ⚛️ 🎢 #philsci

I tried, but it was adamant it couldn't understand the world:

chat.openai.com/share/48e9d3...

🧪💡

7/ BTW, we already have such an oracle: the world we live in. It's a little harder to ask questions of it, though.

See also: twitter.com/yudapearl/st...

6/ These are prediction-yielding explanations.

But the purpose of physics, and science, and even more generally, all of knowledge, is not simply to create black-box prediction models. The purpose is to explain reality.

twitter.com/deutschexpla...

Amid parochial concerns and acrimony, Newton had a way of finding universal theories. In this case, one about the significance of theory itself.

Gleick's biography of Newton depicts him not as an empiricist but more as an early critical rationalist in matters of epistemology. 🧪

We asked: what happens if light carries both spin and orbital angular momentum? We found this creates multiple topological phases in the same sample forming concentric rings around the light vortex that can be tuned by the amplitude and frequency of light. /4

𝙍𝙚𝙖𝙡-𝙨𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙢𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙤𝙡𝙙 𝙙𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙮 𝙞𝙣 𝙜𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙝𝙚𝙣𝙚 𝙞𝙧𝙧𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙗𝙮 𝙩𝙬𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩

New work by Suman Aich, my fantastic graduate student, and myself is now available at arxiv.org/abs/2311.04792.

A quick thread 🧵/1