Tom Rivlin

New preprint! Continuing on our work of describing quantum measurements as a dynamical, unitary process, here we apply these principles to numerical simulations of a more realistic many-body system -- a lattice of hopping particles arxiv.org/abs/2608.11319

In honour of this legend, the following bad joke: -Wow, Claude is so good at explaining quantum physics to me 🤩 -Yeah I agree 🤔

This really should be the top headline on major news sites this morning. One Hacker News poster says "That means roughly 70% of all websites [...] are currently open to remote code execution." thehackernews.com/2026/10/php2... news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016...

Only a matter of time now...

I'm broadly in favour of the Nobel rule on no institutions for the physics prize but we should always keep this in mind icecube.wisc.edu/collaboratio...

Imagine being such a prolific slopposter on arXiv that being rate-limited to two submissions a month is already enough to hinder you blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/u...

Good quote from an article talking about the inevitable dumbing down of society in the AI age

Four years apart. The first was very shortly after I moved to Vienna haha

Brilliant blog post by @3blue1brown.com on "motivated explanations". Lots here to think about for mathematicians (and judging by some papers in quantum info that I read, physicists have a lot to learn here too...) terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/i...

Finally found someone putting it into words in the way that rings most true for me

One month since we submitted this to arXiv. Just counted how many spam emails I received after this came out that invited me to speak at fake conferences or submit the manuscript to bogus pay-to-win journals. The number was 45. And still rising...

Really really sucks that the "Millennium problem solved" headline has to be overshadowed by this ugly drama behind it. Everyone involved should be extensively interviewed to get to the bottom of this...

Finally, someone decided to answer the age-old question, what if we made a video game, but instead of making it bad, we made it good? www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqBq...

Worth the effort

Just watched The Sheep Detectives. It was flocking good. Unbleatable. It really had the chops. (And I'm not just saying that cos my brother worked on it hehehe)

Basically the same opinion for season 2. Was it good? No. Would I recommend it? No. But did I enjoy it? Would I watch more? Sure, yeah

All those years of German classes worth it to appreciate how funny Graf Mülltonnengesicht sounds hahaha

Anyway yes I just stepped outside and oh fuck it's so hot I'm melting

Funny how three different iconic shots from T2 can be used in different ways to signify "oh fuck it's so hot I'm melting"

Tallinn is absolutely peak. Really enjoyed it here. Probably the best European old town experience I've ever had. I recommend the surprisingly high-effort medieval restaurant Olde Hansa. It has authentically old-timey food and vibes. Super fun.

If you're interested in learning more, I wrote a SciShow episode about this! www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONSW...

Just had a scary moment where someone had guessed the master password I use for my password manager. It's fine now, they still needed a code from my email address so they couldn't get actual access (and I've now reset the password), but still concerning! I thought I'd set a strong password!

Had a lot of fun this week doing a Pint of Science talk with my colleague Phila! I think we did a good job with the challenge of explaining quasiprobabilities in quantum mechanics to a general audience!

Whatever intuitions you formed three years ago when you first heard of ChatGPT (and the people boosting it...), you really should be updating them. I'm but a humble physicist but I'd even say this story is the Deep Blue-Kasparov moment for mathematics

New SciShow! This one was wild to write. I changed my mind on what the story was even about multiple times. What even is a unit? A constant of nature? A law of physics? I thought I knew before writing this script, now I'm not so sure! Find out for yourself here: youtu.be/ONSW0a6ihKI?...

A lovely weekend away from Vienna, despite the rain yesterday

Tune in on Tuesday to see the video that Pepe Silvia'd me more than anything I've ever worked on.

Despite working at the Atominstitut for over three years, before this week I'd never seen the reactor while it was in operation. Because the power and radiation output is so low, I reckon this must be as close as it's possible to get to Cherenkov radiation almost anywhere in the world

Great piece. I do scicomm and I'm fine "just" telling fun science stories to the science-enthusiast public... But I know many scicommers want their work to positively impact the world, and there are definitely many bad ideas floating around about how to achieve that. Glad someone's talking about it

I'll be giving a talk with my colleague Phila at a Pint of Science event next month in Vienna! We're planning some cool stuff, it should be fun! pintofscience.at/event/trust-...

Time to share one of my top 10 favourite videos of all time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRsO...

et tu, Google?

NASA Announces Plan To Put Moon On Mars By 2040 https://theonion.com/nasa-announces-plan-to-put-moon-on-mars-by-2040-1849041634/