I’ve been trying to get back to the blog recently. But every time I plan to write a blog post, something happens that requires my attention and adds to the list of items I should be writing about.
I’ve decided that the best I can do, for now, is to summarize some of the key stories that have been on my radar. The overarching news, aside from the 2026 physics Nobel Prize, is what you’ve heard: artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming mathematics and high-energy theoretical physics, no question. That said, what is reported in the media about this is usually wrong in key details, and almost always wildly overstates what’s been accomplished. Nevertheless, the advances in AI models in the last couple of months are historic and transformative, and there is every reason to expect this to accelerate. For people like me, 2027 will surely be very different from autumn 2026, which in turn barely resembles spring 2026.
As many of you are no doubt aware, in the past few days the US Congress voted to make major cuts to scientific research, and the president signed the bill. The government’s National Science Foundation has been cut by more than half, which means that its actual science budget has been cut by much more than that after you account for fixed costs. So vast, sudden and draconian are these cuts that it will take a long time for me and others in the field to figure out what has actually happened.
The reductions seem extreme, quite arbitrary and very poorly thought out. As an example, half of the LIGO observatory (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, whose amazing discoveries, such as this one and this one, earned the United States a Nobel Prize in 2017) is being hit hard. There are currently two interferometers, one in Washington state and one in Lousiana, but one has been largely defunded in this bill, if I understand correctly.
I can see the logic: the scientists have two interferometers, but in tough times they ought to be able to get along with just one, right?
Well, that’s like cutting off one of a runner’s legs. Two were built because two were needed.
With just one, the signal from most gravitational wave events is so weak that you can’t distinguish it from noise. Other interferometers around the world just aren’t working well enough to make up for throwing away one of LIGOs. (And besides, you need three or four interferometers around the world to be able to know precisely in the sky where the waves are coming from, knowledge which can make other major discoveries possible.)
According to Science magazine, “In a two-sentence email to Science, an NSF spokesperson said the plan reflects `a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.’ “
This is not strategic. This is stupid. The amount of money saved, less than 10 cents per year per US citizen, is very small compared to what we as a nation have already spent on this wonderful facility, and cutting LIGO in half makes it dramatically less than half as good — so this is actually a big waste of money both past and future. The decision to make this cut in this way is nothing short of ridiculous and incompetent.
[Not to mention that “constrained fiscal environment” is quite a phrase when you’re increasing the budget deficit rather than shrinking it.]
I fear there are many other similar examples to be found.
By now the word is widely out that Tuesday’s fusion announcement was less of a news flash (as I initially suggested) and more of a overheated news flicker. The politician-scientists who made the announcement that they’d put 2 Megajoules of energy into a pellet of nuclear kindling, and gotten 3 Megajoules out from nuclear fusion, neglected to mention that it took them about 300 Megajoules — about 100 times as much energy from the electrical grid — to run the experiment in the first place. In other words, they said
-2 + 3 = +1 !!! Breakthrough!!!!!!!!!
whereas anyone who knew the details would have said
-300 – 2 + 3 = -299 ? Cool bro, but…
In other words, it was a good day for fusion, but not nearly good enough.
To be fair to everyone, the scientists involved have made tremendous progress in the last few years; they weren’t even close to getting this much energy out until 2021. They’re 10 times ahead of where they were in 2019 and over 100 times ahead of where they were in 2010. If they can continue this progress and figure out how to get another 100 times as much fusion energy out without requiring vastly more electricity, then this all might start to be somewhat interesting.
But even then, it seems it’s going to be very tough to get anything resembling a power plant out of this fusion strategy. Experts seem to think the engineering challenges are immense. (Have any readers heard someone say otherwise?) Perhaps Tokomaks are still the way to go.
I’m annoyed, as I’m sure many of you are. I was myself too trusting, assuming that the politician-scientists who made the claims would be smart enough not to over-hype something that would get so much scrutiny. It’s the 21st century; you can’t come out and say something so undeservedly dramatic without the backlash being loud and swift. Instead they played the political spin game as though it was still the 1970s. I think they were hoping to convince Congress to keep their funding going (and because of an application of their work to nuclear weapons, they may succeed.) But when it comes to nuclear fusion as a solution to our energy/climate crisis — did they really think people wouldn’t quickly figure out they’d been duped? Seriously?
To quote one of the comments on my last post, from Blackstone, “It seems to me that this whole civilization desperately needs a reality check.” I completely agree. We’re so driven now by hype and click-bait that it’s almost impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe at some point the people driving this international daily drama show will realize they’re doing serious harm. Clearly we’re not there yet.
But that’s what this blog is for, as are some others in a similar vein. Hopefully I won’t make too many mistakes like the one I made Tuesday, and when I make them, I’ll always fix them. Thank you to the many commenters who raised valid concerns; I know you’ll always keep me honest if I take a false step.
It’s far from a perfect image. [Note added: if you need an introduction to what images like this actually represent (they aren’t photographs of black holes, which are, after all, black…), start with this.]
EHT’s blurry time-averaged image of the ring of material surrounding the black hole at the center of our galaxy
It’s blurred out in space by imperfections in the telescopic array that is the “Event Horizon Telescope” (EHT) and by dust between us and our galaxy’s center. It’s blurred out in time by the fact that the glowing material around the black hole changes appreciably by the hour, while the EHT’s effective exposure time is a day. There are bright spots in the image that may just be artifacts of exactly where the telescopes are located that are combined together to make up the EHT. The details of the reconstructed image depend on exactly what assumptions are made.
At best, it shows us just a thick ring of radio waves emitted over a day by an ever-changing thick disk of matter around a black hole.
But it’s our galaxy’s black hole. And it’s just the first image. There will be many more to come, sharper and more detailed. Movies will follow. A decade or two from now, what we have been shown today will look quaint.
We already knew the mass of this black hole from other measurements, so there was a prediction for the size of the ring to within twenty percent or so. The prediction was verified today, a basic test of Einstein’s gravity equations. Moreover, EHT’s results now provide some indications that the black hole spins (as expected). And (by pure luck) its spin axis points, very roughly, toward Earth (much like M87’s black hole, whose image was provided by EHT in 2019.)
We can explore these and other details in coming days, and there’s much more to learn in the coming years. But for now, let’s appreciate the picture for what it is. It is an achievement that history will always remember.
Last Thursday, an experiment reported that the magnetic properties of the muon, the electron’s middleweight cousin, are a tiny bit different from what particle physics equations say they should be. All around the world, the headlines screamed: PHYSICS IS BROKEN!!! And indeed, it’s been pretty shocking to physicists everywhere. For instance, my equations are working erratically; many of the calculations I tried this weekend came out upside-down or backwards. Even worse, my stove froze my coffee instead of heating it, I just barely prevented my car from floating out of my garage into the trees, and my desk clock broke and spilled time all over the floor. What a mess!
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Broken, eh? When we say a coffee machine or a computer is broken, it means it doesn’t work. It’s unavailable until it’s fixed. When a glass is broken, it’s shattered into pieces. We need a new one. I know it’s cute to say that so-and-so’s video “broke the internet.” But aren’t we going a little too far now? Nothing’s broken about physics; it works just as well today as it did a month ago.
More reasonable headlines have suggested that “the laws of physics have been broken”. That’s better; I know what it means to break a law. (Though the metaphor is imperfect, since if I were to break a state law, I’d be punished, whereas if an object were to break a fundamental law of physics, that law would have to be revised!) But as is true in the legal system, not all physics laws, and not all violations of law, are equally significant.
Over the past weekend, two of the world’s most influential and brilliant theoretical high-energy physicists — Steve Gubser of Princeton University and Ann Nelson of the University of Washington — fell to their deaths in separate mountain accidents, one in the Alps and one in the Cascades.
Theoretical high energy physics is a small community, and within the United States itself the community is tiny. Ann and Steve were both justifiably famous and highly respected as exceptionally bright lights in their areas of research. Even for those who had not met them personally, this is a stunning and irreplaceable loss of talent and of knowledge.
But most of us did know them personally. For me, and for others with a personal connection to them, the news is devastating and tragic. I encountered Steve when he was a student and I was a postdoc in the Princeton area, and later helped bring him into a social group where he met his future wife (a great scientist in her own right, and a friend of mine going back decades). As for Ann, she was one of my teachers at Stanford in graduate school, then my senior colleague on four long scientific papers, and then my colleague (along with her husband David B. Kaplan) for five years at the University of Washington, where she had the office next to mine. I cannot express what a privilege it always was to work with her, learn from her, and laugh with her.
I don’t have the heart or energy right now to write more about this, but I will try to do so at a later time. Right now I join their spouses and families, and my colleagues, in mourning.
I’m still kind of exhausted from the effort (see yesterday’s post) of completing our survey of some of the many unexpected ways that the newly discovered Higgs particle might decay. But I would be remiss if, before heading off into the holiday break, I didn’t issue some well-deserved congratulations.
The Jade Rabbit rover on the surface of the Moon, 15 December. Credit:Xinhua
Congratulations, first, to China — to the scientists and engineers who’ve managed to put a lander and a rover on the Moon. If you think that’s easy… think again! And they succeeded on their first attempt, a real coup. Now let’s see what science they can do with it, exploring a region of the Moon that apparently may offer answers to important questions about the Moon’s history. Specifically, by accident or by design, the rover is going to be able to explore an area of considerable geological importance, involving one of the Moon’s giant lava flows, a relatively young one (1-2.5 billion years rather than 3 billion or more).
Soyuz VS06, with Gaia, lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport, French Guiana, on 19 December 2013. Copyright: ESA – S. Corvaja, 2013
Congratulations, next, to the scientists and engineers of the European Union, who’ve put a fantastic telescope into space, destined to orbit the sun. The Gaia mission is aimed at doing the extraordinary: mapping, with ultra-high precision, the locations and motions of no less than 1 billion stars within our galaxy — nearly 1% of the total number. The distance to each of these stars will be determined by parallax — looking at how the positions of stars wobble, from the perspective of the spacecraft as it orbits the sun — and the real motions of the stars will be determined by how they drift across the sky, and by the Doppler effect for light. This wealth of information will help scientists figure out the shape and history of the galaxy to a degree never previously possible. Meanwhile, Gaia will also be able to do a lot of other science, picking up distant supernovas outside our galaxy, nearby asteroids orbiting our sun, and signs of planets around other stars, as well as brown dwarfs (small failed stars) that may be floating around between the stars. Gaia can even check some aspects of Einstein’s theory of gravity! Read here about all the wonderful things this mission can do.
Congratulations also to the scientists and engineers in Iran, who’ve apparently moved their rocketry program, and its potential application to human space flight, among other things, another step forward. A second monkey has made the trip to the edge of space, a suborbital trip. (Did the first survive? it’s not clear, and admittedly Iran is known for photo-shopping reality into supporting the story it wants to tell. Not that it matters; it took the US several tries, back over 60 years ago, before a monkey survived the trip, and the survival rate continued to be poor for a while. ) Anyway, it puts Iran well on its way toward its goal of a human in space by 2018.
And finally, congratulations to my own country, the United States, for having passed a budget deal. Not out of the woods yet, but at least it was bipartisan, and we’re not yet talking about another damaging government shutdown, or worse, default. Politics isn’t rocket science. We’ll have to hope our politicians can learn something from China: that it’s good to find some common and worthy goals to work toward together, rather than to fight about absolutely everything and bring the nation’s operations to a halt.
Today, Wednesday December 4th, at 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific time, Sean Carroll and I will be interviewed again by Alan Boyle on “Virtually Speaking Science”. The link where you can listen in (in real time or at your leisure) is
What is “Virtually Speaking Science“? It is an online radio program that presents, according to its website:
Informal conversations hosted by science writers Alan Boyle, Tom Levenson and Jennifer Ouellette, who explore the explore the often-volatile landscape of science, politics and policy, the history and economics of science, science deniers and its relationship to democracy, and the role of women in the sciences.
My own view? Our uncontrolled experiments on our one and only planet must be curbed. Scientific evidence from many quarters show definitively that the Earth is warming. Science can give us arguments, strong but not airtight, that we may be responsible (mainly via carbon emissions, and the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide). It cannot tell us reliably how bad the risks of a warmer Earth will be; there are too many uncertainties. But it seems to me that these are risks we shouldn’t be taking, period. We don’t get to mail-order another planet if we mess this one up.
What is “Virtually Speaking Science“? It is an online radio program that presents, according to its website:
Informal conversations hosted by science writers Alan Boyle, Tom Levenson and Jennifer Ouellette, who explore the explore the often-volatile landscape of science, politics and policy, the history and economics of science, science deniers and its relationship to democracy, and the role of women in the sciences.
Sean Carroll is a Caltech physicist, astrophysicist, writer and speaker, one of the founders of the blog Cosmic Variance, who recently completed an excellent popular book (which I highly recommend) on the Higgs particle, entitled “The Particle at the End of the Universe“. Our interviewer Alan Boyle is a noted science writer, author of the book “The Case for Pluto“, winner of many awards, and currently NBC News Digital’s science editor [at the blog “Cosmic Log“].
