New donut shop name concept:

Donut Eis Requiem

I always thought that should be the tagline for the journal “Science Advances: one funeral at a time.”

No matter how many real pictures I see of you, I can’t shake my original assumption that you bear a strong resemblance to Ludwig Boltzmann.

And a link to a preprint of the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.07476

Crystals of Sound - 02 - Broken Symmetry YouTube video by Jesse Berezovsky

We can also turn it around and use the model to generate rhythms with particular qualities. Here’s an example from a performance I put together with @alex-cooke.bsky.social at the Cleveland Institute of Music a few years ago, with rhythms generated via an algorithm based on this model. (7/7)

We make a lot of simplifying assumptions, but the model still does a remarkable job of describing actual rhythms. In the paper, we compare to all the movements of the six solo cello suites by Bach. In this way, we can quantify the nature of rhythms appearing in music. (6/7)

With this analogy, we can borrow equations from physics to calculate what patterns of sounds are expected. As T decreases, we can hear a transition from random clicks to rhythmic patterns. The rhythms are initially more complex, settling to a regular repeating series as T goes to zero. (5/7)

Phase transitions of matter occur due to a balance of energy and entropy, whose trade-off is specified by parameter called “temperature.” In our model, the arrangement of sounds is governed by a trade-off between two human desires: perception of repeated patterns, and variety. (4/7)

It turns out that just such a structure emerges across a phase transition from randomly-timed sounds to ordered rhythms. In the video above, we see the hierarchical meter appearing as the size of the blue spheres, leading to rhythms mainly consisting of commonly-used note lengths. (3/7)

Rhythms in music follow a general pattern of stronger and weaker time points called “meter.” Musical meter is hierarchical – successively smaller time intervals are divided up, usually by twos or threes. The higher the level of a time point, the more likely a note will begin there. (2/7)

My paper with former student Robert St.Clair finally coming out in Phys Rev E! We show how the ordering of sounds to make musical rhythms can be understood in the same way that atoms become ordered when undergoing a phase transition from, say, a disordered gas to an ordered crystal. (1/7) ⚛️🧪🎵

I always pass out oranges and have the students draw the Bloch sphere on them. It doesn’t really help with a connection to the math, but the absurdity (and hands-on nature) makes it memorable.

At the end, we see the two states (yellow and blue) have been distinguished – each is correlated with a different state of the detector. The inset shows a representation of the information obtainable from the detector. At the end, the detector states for blue vs. yellow are diametrically opposed.

The energy difference between the two levels of the “detector” is increased when the particle’s wave function overlaps with the black dashed lines. The wave function correlated with two different states of the detector d+ and d- are plotted offset from each other.

Here’s a new visualization I just put together of a how a two-level quantum system can “measure” the difference between a particle in a superposition of two wave packets added to, vs. subtracted from each other (yellow wave vs. blue wave). 🧪⚛️

Decommissioned thermonuclear bomb next to an inflatable Easter bunny.

At the Air Force museum in Dayton, OH. Apparently the Easter bunny brought a thermonuclear bomb.

Preparing a presentation about interpretations of quantum mechanics and found myself typing the words “Philosophers disagree.” A maximally true statement?

And when a constipated mathematician could work out all their problems with a pencil.

Ahh, just falling short of the 100 qubit bar! 😂

So IBM clears the bar with their 120 qubit chips, but trapped ions with about 50 qubits do not?

I heard a joke about lasers but I won’t repeat it: I believe stimulated emission should only be used for the purpose of procreation.

I enjoyed Feynman’s explanations of symmetry here: www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_52.html#Ch...

Shepherd’s pie with the letter pi inscribed in the mashed potatoes

Shepherd’s pi.

Incidentally, what I wanted to know is if there is any general facts about transmission and reflection for V(x) vs -V(x). As far as I can tell, there is not.

The citations were not helpful. I think it did the thing where it took something similar, like reflection and transmission for V(x)=V(-x) and changed it around a little.

Google AI search results, falsely claiming that in 1d scattering, transmission and reflection probabilities are generally identical for potentials V(x) and -V(x).

This is… blatantly wrong. I even “dived deeper” in AI mode and it offered me a proof! The proof sounded convincing, but must have had an error somewhere… ⚛️

Actually a pretty good use case.
“I just got fired.” >>> “Thrilled and humbled to announce that I will be leveraging my deep expertise to embark on the next phase of…”

That always makes me wonder: in the pilot-wave picture, are there branching conscious agents within the pilot wave, in addition to the singular consciousness singled out by the “particles“?

So the question for “quantum-state realists” is whether the Schrödinger eq alone (i.e. MWI) is sufficient to explain everything (including Born’s rule) or if we need to add something extra. Or if there is sufficient horror at MWI to justify adding something extra.

Look, I’m not a pacifist. I genuinely believe that some wars are just and necessary (although they are always still horrific and no amount of justification lessens that horror or the moral weight that attaches to it). But this doesn’t meet any of the just war criteria. For anyone who wants a quick…