Rafael Wagner

Rafael Wagner

@quantumrw.bsky.social

PhD Student in quantum foundations and quantum information

1.3K followers2.8K following377 posts

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Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

New paper out in #PRX_Quantum! 📃📃 We show when a heat-flow reversal is actually a signature of quantum nonclassicality as described by quantum generalized contextuality. #QuantumInformation #Contextuality #Nonclassicality #QuantumThermodynamics journals.aps.org/prxquantum/a...

journals.aps.orgContextuality in Anomalous Heat FlowFor a class of quantum systems that exhibit contextuality, a rigorous theoretical connection between anomalous heat flow and quantumness is established, thereby opening avenues to explore nonclassical...
Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

Nós conseguimos mobilizar o Brasil ainda a tempo de evitar o retrocesso gigantesco do bolsonarismo (novamente). Não foi cedo o suficiente pra evitar o que aconteceu no Congresso e no Senado, mas mostrou uma coisa: dá pra lutar, dá pra ter esperança. #Lula #Science #Left

Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

Última semana pra ter esperança do Brasil não voltar pro buraco do Bolsonarismo Depois quatro anos de luta pra encontrar uma pessoa pra próxima eleição

Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

I've recently learned that some (all?) US institutions are de-incentivizing collaborations with researchers from China and Russia.... It seems that one is not entirely free to collaborate with researchers from these countries. If one wants, this demands an institutional verification procedure...

lavocedinewyork.com30 U.S. Universities Under Scrutiny Over Research Ties with China, Russia and IranThe Pentagon has ordered 30 U.S. universities, including Harvard and New York University, to review their financial and research ties
Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

Here is an interesting one from Henry Wilton: "There is a long list of mathematical structures and norms that OpenAI seems to be intent on damaging. By refusing to name the authors of their papers, they imply that mathematics is no longer a human endeavour. " (1/4)

proofsandprompts.com100+ reactions to 100+ solutions“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
View full thread
Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

"(...) OpenAI haven’t shared fundamental information about how the problems are selected or the failure rates of their attempts. This information should be a necessary requirement for any serious scientific discussion of their tools. " (3/4)

Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

"And of course there is the basic financial injustice that their hugely valuable models learned to reason by copying the very reasoning that our community made available for free through the Open Access movement." (4/4)

Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

Here is an interesting one from Henry Wilton: "There is a long list of mathematical structures and norms that OpenAI seems to be intent on damaging. By refusing to name the authors of their papers, they imply that mathematics is no longer a human endeavour. " (1/4)

proofsandprompts.com100+ reactions to 100+ solutions“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

"(...) They don’t submit their results to journals, which both implies that the norms of the mathematical community are defunct and makes it impossible for the community to digest their results." (2/4)

Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

"(...) it feels like we’ve been working on an archeological dig for 4 years, gradually discovering more and more of a really cool-looking dinosaur skeleton, and then a trillion-dollar company showed up and just blasted the whole thing with TNT, handed us the whole skeleton, and walked away."

proofsandprompts.com100+ reactions to 100+ solutions“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

The QIP conference deadline will make this week the one with the largest number of submissions for quantum physics arXiv in the whole year. Already today the number of submitted manuscripts was massive. Should quant-ph be subdivided?

Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

"Across academia, incentive structures have long rewarded productivity over understanding, and generative AI now makes productivity easy to manufacture." Clearly *incentive structures* need to change, especially in underdeveloped countries terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/27/c...

terrytao.wordpress.comCognitive Sanctuaries or: Manifesto of the Department Chair[This is a guest post by Jess Werk. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Hello, I am Jess Werk, professor and chair of Astronomy at th…
Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

"The people with the strongest incentive to use these tools and hide that they have done so are the same ones under the most pressure to publish: our students and early-career scientists." That blog post is a bomb

Rafael Wagner reposted

Zlatko Minev
@zlatko-minev.bsky.social

Hiring alert: Our team at Google Quantum AI is hiring, see the post link below. It is a senior research scientist role, with ownership and leadership from concept to validated experiment. If you are finishing a PhD, please do not rule yourself out. www.google.com/about/caree...

careers.google.comSenior Research Scientist, Workflow Tools Pathfinding, Quantum AIAs an organization, Google maintains a portfolio of research projects driven by fundamental research, new product innovation, product contribution and infrastructure goals, while providing individuals and teams the freedom to emphasize specific types of work. As a Research Scientist, you'll setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly, managing deadlines and deliverables while applying the latest theories to develop new and improved products, processes, or technologies. From creating experiments and prototyping implementations to designing new architectures, our research scientists work on real-world problems that span the breadth of computer science, such as machine (and deep) learning, data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilers for mobile platforms, as well as core search and much more. As a Research Scientist, you'll also actively contribute to the wider research community by sharing and publish
Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

Being a human who writes, reads, and reviews papers (with AI *assistance* but a lot of attention) in an era where people just use AI for reading, writing, and reviewing everything sucks a lot.

Rafael Wagner reposted

Sean Carroll
@seanmcarroll.bsky.social

If I understand this, two mathematicians (one at Anthropic) combined a great deal of human effort with LLM input to come close to a famous problem, showing that the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid mechanics developed singularities. But someone from OpenAI might have peeked at their ChatGPT logs...

Quantian@quantian.bsky.social

Dancing very very VERY close to saying “OpenAI stole our almost-complete proof of Navier-Stokes from internal access to our ChatGPT sessions because they were desperate to scoop Anthropic” which is absolutely 100% a believable thing OpenAI would do right now cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...

Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

GPT-1 was released in 2018 and it has now 8 years old. Should it receive the Fields Medal for its problem-solving skills in mathematics, given that it might have just solved one of the biggest of all?

Rafael Wagner reposted

James Wootton
@decodoku.bsky.social

We now have specific architecture plans for fault-tolerant quantum computers. Finally we can ask to within an order of magnitude: how much time will a megaquop take? Assume 10^-6 logical error rate and 1 shot. Basically a Hello World worthy of actually running on a QPU. What's the lower bound?

Rafael Wagner reposted

John C. Baez
@johncarlosbaez.bsky.social

Don Zagier wrote: “There are two facts about the distribution of prime numbers of which I hope to convince you so overwhelmingly that they will be permanently engraved in your hearts. The first is that they are the most arbitrary and ornery objects studied by mathematicians..." (1/n)

Rafael Wagner reposted

Gemma De les Coves
@gemmadlc.bsky.social

Replying to @gemmadlc.bsky.social

These limitations are determined by the degrees of freedom that support the knowledge of the subject, the ready state, and whether it wants to learn about the past or future state of the object. They give rise to rich landscape of epistemic horizons. E.g., for prediction:

Rafael Wagner
@quantumrw.bsky.social

Awesome new work advancing the literature around Spekkens’ toy theory!

Gemma De les Coves@gemmadlc.bsky.social

The view from within can differ from the view from without. An observer, which is a physical system itself, may experience limitations to what it can learn similar to those in Quantum Theory, even in a deterministic theory. New work with J. Fankhauser & T. Gonda arxiv.org/abs/2608.258...

Rafael Wagner reposted

Gemma De les Coves
@gemmadlc.bsky.social

The view from within can differ from the view from without. An observer, which is a physical system itself, may experience limitations to what it can learn similar to those in Quantum Theory, even in a deterministic theory. New work with J. Fankhauser & T. Gonda arxiv.org/abs/2608.258...

Rafael Wagner reposted

nate
@loglog.wtf

there should be a complexity class for problems where LLM proofs are harder to verify than solve directly

Rafael Wagner reposted

Andreas Wallraff
@andreasateth.bsky.social

Looking forward to be attending the Superconducting Qubits & Algorithms (SQA) 2026 conference in Gothenburg, Sweden from August 25 to 28. I will be giving an invited keynote talk on the opening evening and present new work on #quantum error correction from our lab.

Rafael Wagner reposted

Margaret Harris
@drmlharris.bsky.social

This article on a new way of modelling the preparation of quantum magic states is a great semi-technical introduction to this important aspect of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Story by Yousra Farhani, a PhD student contributor to @physicsworld.bsky.social. ⚛️ 🧪 physicsworld.com/a/shortcut-f...

physicsworld.comShortcut for simulating logical magic states could accelerate the design of fault-tolerant quantum computers – Physics WorldNew classical simulation technique makes it practical to benchmark large-scale logical magic-state preparation protocols under realistic noise conditions

Rafael Wagner reposted

Jonathan Oppenheim
@postquantum.bsky.social

Replying to @postquantum.bsky.social

In the meantime, some great news: We’ve been awarded a gift from the David and Elaine Potter Foundation, and in October, we will be launching the David Potter Institute for Quantum Information and Spacetime, @ucl.ac.uk . www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2026/au... More info at www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical... 2/2

ucl.ac.uk£8 million gift to create quantum institute at UCLThe new David Potter Institute for Quantum Information and Spacetime, established thanks to a landmark award from the David and Elaine Potter Foundation, will seek to reconcile quantum mechanics and g...

Rafael Wagner reposted

Jonathan Oppenheim
@postquantum.bsky.social

The path-integral formulation of the Postquantum theory of classical gravity is now in Physical Review X! Other results from our group have been published at the same time, so this is a good opportunity to review progress. ⚛️ 🧪https://superposer.substack.com/p/postquantum-gravity-new-results-and 1/2

superposer.substack.comPostquantum gravity: new results and the state of play (I)A covariant path-integral formulation of the Postquantum theory of classical gravity (PQG) has just been published in Physical Review X, and a few other related papers have come at the same time.

Rafael Wagner reposted

John C. Baez
@johncarlosbaez.bsky.social

Some billiard news! To set the stage: in 1775, Giovanni Fagnagno proved that for every acute triangle, there's a way to bounce a billiard ball inside in a periodic orbit - an orbit that repeats itself. (Read the alt text for the trick.) But what about obtuse triangles? (1/n)

Rafael Wagner reposted

UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering
@uchicagopme.bsky.social

Diamond-based quantum sensors can obtain previously unseen levels of detail about how life works and how diseases form. New research has overturned a major assumption limiting the sensors' effectiveness, which can be harnessed for more detailed readings of cells. 🧪 pme.uchicago.edu/news-events/...

pme.uchicago.eduFinding a hidden culprit in quantum biosensorsResearch indicates surface effects, not temperature, are responsible for a longtime hurdle in using quantum tech to explore living cells.