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
NASA Announces Plan To Put Moon On Mars By 2040 theonion.com/nasa-announces-plan-to-p...
This is really good from @seamas.bsky.social
Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
#ArtemisII
www.nasa.gov/missions/art...
For the first time in over 50 years, there are human beings more than ~1000 km from the Earth 🫡
Can’t open windows in space!
Finally, for the first time ever, a useful quantum foundations paper.
What's the difference between Australia and Austria?
One's got loads of Sheilas, the other's got loads of Schieles
And, yes, I want to acknowledge, I KNOW that Cyclops's "punch dimension" thing is no longer Marvel Comics canon. But saying punch dimension is just so fun!
New SciShow I wrote! What's the strongest laser in the world? Well, it depends what you mean by strongest... Find out more in this super fun video!
Also featuring possibly my favourite introduction I've ever written for a video
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqPl...
We talk a lot here about weird quantum things, from conceptual foundations questions to technological challenges. It's easy to be confused by it all, so here's Phila from our group giving a TEDx Talk at TU Wien last year on demystifying quantum physics! www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJkO...
Project Hail Mary... I give it two thumbs down (this is a joke that makes sense if you've seen the film it actually was a 10/10 I laughed I cried I loved it)
This is actually the first project I worked on in Vienna, starting in 2023 (it took a while to get fully published), and it directly follows on from the ideas I spoke about in my New Scientist article in 2024 (any excuse to re-post that!) www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...
New paper in PRA! Continuing our long-running study of quantum measurements as dynamical processes and the emergence of classicality, here we study observables that best encode measurement outcomes under equilibration-on-average dynamics and quantum Darwinism
journals.aps.org/pra/abstract...
Marty Supreme was very fun. It was the most movie I've ever seen in a movie. You really get your money's worth with a ticket.
Happy 200th birthday to UCL! Last time I visited I made sure to snap a photo with my boy JB. I used to pass by him all the time on my way to lunch haha
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
As of January 1st 2026, John and I are **no longer** the owners of Complexly (the educational media company we started 15 years ago that makes Crash Course, Eons, SciShow, Study Hall, and a bunch of other shows.)
We have been the sole owners for all that time...
Just wrote a summary of the various resarch groups in our theory department. I actually work across ~3 of these groups on various projects!
Eliza was kind enough to allow me to contribute to this already-mostly-finished project and I had a lot of fun working on it. If you ever wanted to learn or refresh yourself on the basics of quantum optics, I can for sure endorse this wonderful guide
Spending today doing the things I love most: fussing over DNS settings for a domain name change and also separately fussing over LaTeX packages to upload something to arXiv 🙃🙃🙃
But yes, say hello to QuOI!
Had this experience today. Once you start to notice this pattern you really do see it everywhere
Whenever I'm on the London Underground and the announcer says "please make use of all available doors" I always imagine they want me to pass through every aperture simultaneously like a quantum particle
New SciShow by me! With tricks from biology and physics, lots of things in nature are very good at efficiently getting from A to B, and one way people love to test this is using mazes. So from slime molds to lasers, here's 5 surprisingly good maze solvers! www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKYd...
Our Research Unit had a pretty amazing year in 2025. In total:
-3️⃣7️⃣ preprints were released
-5️⃣ of those were also fully published
-1️⃣9️⃣ more preprints from previous years were fully published
Congrats, everyone! ❤️ Here's to a fun year of research in 2026
www.quitphysics.info/publications
This was fun to organise and host! Lots of good discussions. Not mentioned in the official post: we also had the "Ig Journies" -- the Worst Paper Of The Year award. I won't mention who won that 👀
Control was one of my fave games of all time. So so cool, the vibes were amazing. Very excited for a sequel youtu.be/e1_eZyFM5-4?...