David Sloan

Now I'm loose on the internet, and I've got some strong opinions about contact manifolds.

What if the real treasure was the set of discoveries about the fundamental nature of physical reality that we made along the way?

And again - our postdocs are awesome.

Lucy James, one of FQxI’s new Foundational Fellows, is working on two of the fellowship’s projects, the arrow of time and multiverses. 🧪 ⚛️ Video by @gabefitz.bsky.social Paintings and prints: The Met, Rijksmuseum, Wellcome Collection (public domain)

Our postdocs (Foundational Fellows) are fantastic.

@high-fae.bsky.social, one of FQxI’s new Foundational Fellows, explains a maths/logic puzzle. 🧪 🎞️ by @gabefitz.bsky.social #maths #puzzle #science

Highly relevant across academia. Every time they need a quote journalists just go to the same people, usually those with sufficient privilege to be completely insulated from whatever's going on.

Talking disruption in science with @fqxi.org and @gabefitz.bsky.social - nice write-up on qspace.fqxi.org.

I once got sent a large, engraved, heavy (multiple kg) stone to my work address. With instructions that I was to pass it on to Beyonce. Before anyone asks, no. Not even remotely. Though I'm sure she'd be agree about the role of scale in physics and thus be a fan of dynamical similarity.

First hit's free...

Happy 20th birthday FQxI!

Yes, I know THE and Times aren't technically the same thing, but if two orderings disagree so wildly with one another, how can we trust any of them?

If you've never heard a fire alarm at work it isn't because there haven't been any fires. It's because your institution didn't install smoke detectors.

From their own article "St Andrews, ranked second in the Guardian’s university league table for 2026, accepts one of the highest percentages in the UK of privately educated students. " St Andrews was just ranked top of the Times UK university rankings.

Newspaper publishes "University Guide" that correlates high scores with middle/upper class students. Newspaper is then shocked to find classism rampant at one of its top ranked institutions. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Very much this. I don't teach my students so they know physics, I teach them so they can think like a physicist*. * An idealized physicist. In a vacuum. I know how some of my colleagues actually think...

I'm patiently waiting for the deluge of "All the jobs have been given to less qualified applicants who only got the position because they are sexual harassers" complaints. Bets on whether they get here before Godot?

When you ask me what's wrong with #science in #academia, you get a rant. Thankfully the excellent editors at @bigthink.com made it coherent. #academicsky 🔭🧪

Science needs people who can afford to be wrong. Yet we seem to have built a career ladder that removes them. [VISUAL THREAD]

So I guess the mnemonic for the great lakes will need to be updated from HOMES to SHAME.

An excellent volume, with work by great researchers at the interface of physics and philosophy. And some weird guy who kept going on about cosmology.

Make a band bigger Gigadeth

Jordan Scharnhorst is one of our new FQxI Fellows. He’s joining us for Foundational Answers, a programme taking stock of progress on 10 major topics in foundational science and identifying the questions still open. A part of that work is adversarial collaboration. Jordan explains what that means.

Absolutely - looking historically emphasises both the need for repeated experiments and tests of independent predictions of the theory.

To be fair it has appeared on the Guardian's website: www.theguardian.com/education/20... “In one example the person being complained about drafted the response to the claimant rejecting his complaints against them.” How could this ever be considered a good idea?

Wonder if this will get the same level of media attention that other Cambridge news always seems to get.

Some physicists believe that the future can influence the past. For someone hearing that for the first time... it sounds pretty crazy. We spoke briefly to Matthew Leifer about how that can possibly be true!

To be fair, that's how paper* used to work. * yes, I know, in a generic sense of the word.

"You've been poisoned. Would you like one dose of antidote or to play the roulette wheel for 100 doses?"

🍸 Three #FlashFinding cocktail punches on #FoodSecurity in post-COVID India. Fast, evidence-based insights on how households coped & what this means for food systems and policy. 📽️ ✔️ youtube.com/shorts/Liq1U... ✔️ youtube.com/shorts/CSvdJ... ✔️ youtube.com/shorts/wL2hT... #Nutrition #India #COVID19

If you have no divisors I will find you, prime after prime.

A corridor chat with Chris Smeenk, professor at @westernu.ca, about correcting common misunderstandings about the Big Bang and the early universe. Chris' research centres around the scientific method and the nature of our knowledge of physics.

Makes more sense if you read it in the voice of Zapp Brannigan.

The curvature satisfies the Bianchi identity. It is left to the reader to determine if it also satisfies the Bianchi supremacy and the Bianchi ultimatum.

Captain of Titanic advises increase speed and ignore icebergs.

And it happens again - original email 9:12 PM on Friday, harassing follow-up 9:12PM on Sunday. You won't believe how fast I declined that one. Journal editors: if you do this, you contribute to a culture of overwork and poor mental health, and I will NOT sacrifice that for you.

I'm all in favour of not allowing LLM generated content. Given the central role that arXiv plays in modern physics communication they had better be sure that they are right, and have genunine transparency in their moderation process. A false positive could be devastating to a PhD student's career.

Everything going according to plan for Starmer...

Getting ready to teach: Lecture written PDF on flashdrive Double-checked it's available online to the students Got my notes Grabbed my laptop Jacket on, leave house, get in car Realize I'm still wearing slippers. It might be a rough one today.