Physics
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2026
3 articles on this page- Oppenheimer Didn’t Have an Acceptable Use Policy Anthropic has drawn a public line on military use of its models. The physics community spent the better part of the twentieth century working out what it means to draw that line after you have already built the thing. As a physicist watching this unfold, I find the parallels clarifying and the differences more unsettling than the parallels.
- If You Think This Is Written by AI, You Are Both Right and Wrong AI detectors can flag human writing, including historical and highly formulaic prose. Evidence exists for a false-positive risk affecting some non-native English writers; claims about autistic or physics-trained writers need direct validation. The detector score is not authorship evidence.
- Try to Relax — and Other Things That Prevent Themselves “Try to relax” can recruit the monitoring that keeps tension salient. Traversable wormholes face a very different constraint: sustaining their geometry requires stress-energy that violates classical energy conditions. The comparison is an analogy about constraints, not one mechanism shared by psychology and spacetime.
2025
4 articles on this page- A Gas at Temperature T: Xenakis and the Physics of Stochastic Music Iannis Xenakis used probability distributions, Markov processes, and game structures as compositional tools. Pithoprakta maps a Gaussian law derived from kinetic theory to glissando slopes; the orchestra is an analogy to a gas, not a thermodynamic system with measured temperature.
- From Oxide to Oversampling: The Physics of Recorded Sound ‘Analogue warmth’ and ‘digital coldness’ are not aesthetic preferences alone — they involve different physics. Magnetic tape saturates and compresses in level- and machine-dependent ways. Delta-sigma modulators push much quantisation noise out of band. Both effects are calculable.
- The Cat’s Eye: Slit Pupils, Thin-Film Mirrors, and 135-Fold Dynamic Range Domestic-cat pupils change area by about 135-fold, and a reflective tapetum sends transmitted light back through the retina. The pupil/ecology link is a comparative correlation; simple multilayer equations illustrate tapetal optics but do not supply cat-specific reflectance or sensitivity values.
- From Thought Experiment to Qubit: Schrödinger’s Cat at Ninety In 1935, Schrödinger introduced the cat as a reductio ad absurdum of quantum superposition. Ninety years later, “cat states” — superpositions of coherent states with opposite phases — are a practical tool in quantum computing. Bosonic cat qubits can bias bit-flip errors exponentially with photon number under appropriate stabilisation, and are a serious candidate architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computation. The cat is no longer a paradox. It is a qubit.
2024
3 articles on this page- Primes Are Energy Levels: The Montgomery-Odlyzko Conjecture In October 2024, the largest known prime was announced — 41 million digits, found by a GPU-assisted GIMPS search. But the deepest prime story is not about record-breaking numbers. It is about a 1972 teatime conversation at the Institute for Advanced Study, a pair correlation formula, and the suspicion — numerically confirmed to extraordinary precision — that the zeros of the Riemann zeta function are the energy levels of an undiscovered quantum system.
- The Hamiltonian of Intelligence: From Spin Glasses to Neural Networks On October 8, 2024, Hopfield and Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Hopfield energy has Ising form, and Boltzmann machines import statistical- mechanical distributions. Those are genuine mathematical connections, but they do not make transformers, AlphaFold, protein folding, and spin glasses one causal lineage or universality class.
- Why Cats Purr at 25 Hz: Vocal Fold Pads and the Physics of Self-Sustained Oscillation A 2023 Current Biology experiment showed that excised cat larynges can produce purr-like low-frequency oscillations under airflow without neural input. Connective-tissue pads are a plausible contributing mechanism, not a settled complete account; frequency overlap does not establish bone healing in cats.