I was saddened to hear of Michael Hall's passing. Over the years he offered me both encouragement and thoughtful scientific advice, most recently last December. A great scientist and a rare model of kindness and integrity in academia, he will be greatly missed.

We should mandate hyperlinks to original sources in references. It is a minimal safeguard, but it could at least slow the propagation of hallucinated papers that are being "laundered" into reality...

What does “macroscopic” really mean in quantum theory? One of the persistent difficulties in discussing the emergence of macroscopic irreversibility from microscopic quantum dynamics is that we often talk about “macroscopic states”, “macroscopic operat…

New blog post. This is about macroscopicity and "inferential reference frames".

quantumquia.com/2025/12/16/w...

I agree. As a managing editor myself, the first thing I do is check the references. The presence of hallucinations is a significant red flag.

This level of vetting is not difficult, and I would expect the journal to screen submissions at least to this extent before assigning them to editors.

We're at war. Be careful out there.

I just received a paper for a Springer journal that was obviously LLM-generated, complete with non-existent theorems, missing proofs, and hallucinated references. The journal has double-blind review. You see the problem? Stone thrown, hand hidden. No one to name-shame.

I sympathize, Mark, but I’m afraid the problem of "ensuring the integrity" of peer review runs much deeper, and long predates LLMs. I’ve seen plenty of genuinely dreadful referee reports over the years (oh, yes I have!), and the fact a human wrote them did not make them any less so...

Are there any students left after they heard this?

“What I tell students is that, if what you’re trying to optimize publishing papers, it’s actually honestly not that hard to do. Just do really crappy low-quality work... But if you want to do really thoughtful, careful work, you’re at a disadvantage because you’re effectively unilaterally disarmed”

I'm seriously going to do that in the next paper. All work and no play...

Can I call them quantum panini relative entropies instead of sandwiched?

Bayes’ Rule Goes Quantum Bayes’ rule is often introduced in textbooks through examples involving urns filled with colored balls. It is striking, however, that the same formula works just as well in situations totally…

New blog post about the quantum Bayes rule paper, joint work with with Ge Bai and @valerioscarani.bsky.social

quantumquia.com/2025/10/08/b...

Whenever I see the scoring letters "SABC," I read "soprano, alto, tenor, bass" instead.

Tomorrow will be Cornell Information Theory Day, with program available here:

find.engineering.cornell.edu/cornell-info...

Book of abstracts here:

find.engineering.cornell.edu/files/2025/0...

MDPI are running out of nouns in the English dictionary for the titles of their journals

If a referee is so lazy and useless to ask an LLM to replace themselves, that is what they deserve.

Here it is again:

It was meant to be a screenshot... Something went wrong apparently.

But at the same time sending one qbit, you can transmit two bits. *

*fine prints

Holevo in his 1973 "Statistical decision theory for quantum systems" seems to be using already ante-litteram SPD ideas. See, e.g., Eq.(4.8)

The Multiverse: a Philosophical Introduction This book is a philosopher's introduction to the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. I present and assess three versions of the idea: one version from philosophy, and two from physic...

After about two decades of friendship, I now realize that there's a "Nicholas" between "Jeremy" and "Butterfield."

arxiv.org/abs/2505.23639

Rather, it's the Quantum Creed!

I received this email from Scipost and thought I would share it here. It's an open letter to the scientific community asking for help to keep Scipost alive and sustainable. (It's a bit long, so I'm sharing it as a public link in my Evernote).

share.evernote.com/note/dc4f9e1...

Refs :

- clintel.org/nobel-prize-...

- co2coalition.org/publications...

`cleveref` now refers to appendices as sections · Issue #362 · latex3/hyperref Using hyperref 2024-11-05 v7.01l with LaTeX 2024-11-01 and the example file: \documentclass{article} \usepackage{hyperref} \usepackage{cleveref} \begin{document} \cref{sec:one} and \cref{sec:a} \se...

I'm a huge fan and an active user of the hyperref and cleveref LaTeX packages, but unfortunately it looks like they are no longer compatible (and cleveref is not actively maintained).
github.com/latex3/hyper...

Any suggestions for cleveref alternatives? (Or anyone able to maintain it...?)

Then I'll stop it, promise!

@philipp-strasberg.bsky.social @mathsmire.bsky.social @jcsphysics.bsky.social

HISTORY OF PHYSICS

On fear, by Paul Dirac.

I would like to refer particularly to Lorentz.

Any of you who have studied relativity must surely have wondered why it was that Lorentz succeeded in getting correctly all the basic equations needed to establish

1/

Or, perhaps, he just didn't want to get into a fight with nasty, hard-headed (today we would say toxic) colleagues. Maybe he thought of Boltzmann. But I wouldn't call this "fear".

After Reddit Thread on 'ChatGPT-Induced Psychosis', OpenAI Rolls Back GPT4o Update - Slashdot Rolling Stone reports on a strange new phenomenon spotted this week in a Reddit thread titled "Chatgpt induced psychosis." The original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her pa...

And then, this: "AI induced phychosis", with people being convinced they're the "chosen ones". slashdot.org/story/25/05/...