New post out on our recent preprint. How to control quantum chaos with random measurements and feedback! With an analogy to boulders and mountaintops
open.substack.com/pub/jhwilson...
Introducing my colleague, William (Bill) Shelton to our Substack "Quantum Matters"! Here he talks about quantum materials beyond the Silicon Paradigm
open.substack.com/pub/jhwilson...
I am/was aware of this. It’s a funny story but it’s 1961, for one, and if used as an argument against copy editing, these anecdotal arguments smell of confirmation bias.
I guess my unpopular opinion is that i like and appreciate copy editors.
How does copy editing remove data points from a figure? I’ve never experienced something like that.
I’m with you, but surely you’ve seen people who think formatting and grammar are just an afterthought. I’ve definitely refereed papers like that and I was relieved that there was a copy editor so I didn’t have to point out all of those flaws on top of the content.
Copy editors can be invaluable, there are numerous arxiv articles that are poorly formatted with terrible grammar and spelling. There are even good papers like this, and a copy editor can leave the content intact while making the article readable.
Trying something new:
A 🧵 on a topic I find many students struggle with: "why do their 📊 look more professional than my 📊?"
It's *lots* of tiny decisions that aren't the defaults in many libraries, so let's break down 1 simple graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
🔗 www.ft.com/content/73a1...
Had a blast exploring how collective measurements drive both control and entanglement in chaotic quantum circuits. Collective measurements plus local corrections stabilize an unstable orbit, revealing “superballistic” dynamics—a neat blend of classical automata and quantum randomness.
With mathematicians, we unveil a breakthrough in bilayer graphene—defect states in the continuum engineered without symmetry protection! Our new method pinpoints non-scattering bound states to a single orbital pair, unlocking possibilities in layered 2D materials. journals.aps.org/prb/abstract...
The cultural revolution also targeted academics
I suppose you could argue that e is not as rational as 2
I've been working on small scripting projects since grad school but only recently noticed that if I don't create a README, I'll forget what the script does and how it works. Once that's made, there's almost no extra work to put it on GitHub for others to see and tinker with if they care.
This was a fun little coding project. I had always wanted an easy way to write my homework assignments in markdown and toggle solutions on and off, so I created a Pandoc/LaTeX template and Python script to automate this process.
Probably a silly question: Is it related to the work by Rudolph and co. on the reality of the quantum state? (It looks like 'yes' from my quick scanning of the papers.) I'm curious about the classical Bayesian vs. quantum differences here...
I am perpetually intrigued by the idea of taking real space seriously. In this work, we explore real-space multifractal wavefunctions in a quasiperiodic version of TBG, which can both emulate the surface of topological superconductors and enhance superconductivity.
journals.aps.org/prb/abstract...
You should carry a t-shirt cannon with the cover of your book printed on it for just such occasions. :-)
Information wants to be scrambled! ΔS>0
I excel at bummer speech. No first amendment protections for me.
Free Speech (noun): Speech that an algorithm filters out to keep your attention on the platform longer and makes companies the most money, regardless of the consequences.
Antonym: Bummer speech (noun): Speech that doesn't get clicks.
You can’t find me on the quantum Erasure channel.
news.rice.edu/news/2025/ma...
All the idiots around such scions are potential carriers.
Imagine an illness who's ability to kill is directly proportional to the person's ability to contribute to its eradication. It would take out all Kwisatz Haderachs and is probably why Leto II gave up his humanity to be the God Emperor.
I really like it. It’s thought provoking and the hero is a theoretical physicist.
When this crosses my mind about travel to countries whose regimes I might find odious, I think of Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed.
We gotta reject “Well, RFK jr. is right about some things” and accept “if we don’t confront the real problems with our systems, it becomes much easier for con artists like this guy to manipulate people.”
Wow, I hadn’t appreciated this whole story. For-profit scientific publishers have various problems, but Elsevier manages to consistently be the worst.
Open source woes: LaTeX-mode isn't activating; a new bug broke it. Latexmk is no longer running; the option is silently disabled, and the fix is buried in an old git commit.
I love Emacs, but sometimes jumping ship would save me so much debugging time.
