4gravitons
I had two pieces up this month, one in New Scientist and one in Quanta. I figured I’d give a bit of “bonus info” for both here. The New Scientist piece covered a paper arguing that, according to the supernova evidence, there is no need for dark energy, because the universe isn’t speeding up...
4gravitons
I don’t think people who argue about reductionism are really arguing about reductionism. Reductionism is the idea that the behavior of big, complicated things (people, economies, ecosystems) boils down to the behavior of their smallest constituents (molecules, atoms, subatomic particles). It’s...
4gravitons
This week was Amplitudes, my old subfield’s big yearly conference. This year, it’s at Queen Mary University of London. I’m too busy to attend these days, now that nobody is paying me a salary to do that sort of thing. But it’s still a good chance to keep up with the field, which helps me...
4gravitons
It’s been a while since I’ve said this: I’m at a conference this week! Specifically, I’m at Lancefest, which is not just any old conference, but a birthday conference for Lance Dixon. When a renowned academic turns 60 or so, their students and collaborators hold a birthday party-flavored...
4gravitons
I recently finished reading The Orphan Master’s Son, a (Pulitzer-winning, apparently) novel set in 2000’s-era North Korea. In one plot point, Kim Jong Il has agents steal a Japanese telescope designed to measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, under the mistaken impression that it will...
acidbourbon
TLDR I built a relatively simple, cheap, and most of all maker friendly Constant Fraction Discriminator for high precision photomultiplier (and SiPM) timing applications. I wrote a paper about the circuit, it was published open access (yay!), and now I hope you’ll read it Motivation...