@fisherastro.bsky.social
Caltech-UC Berkeley-LLNL-Chicago-UMass Dartmouth. Sabbatical 23-24 @ Institute for Advanced Studies and Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies. American & Italian Theoretical and Computational Astrophysicist. Professor. He/him/his.
Well-deserved congratulations!!
This was done with @anthropic.com's Claude Code. You can grab the code yourself here: github.com/rtfisher/tor... .
I have been experimenting with large language models to "collaboratively" write code to illustrate key physical concepts for my junior-level mechanics class for physics majors. It did a very nice job in generating an animation of the "tennis racket theorem."
We're hiring a teaching physics professor! Our campus feels like a liberal arts sized college within a research university. Our current teaching faculty teach first year to graduate level courses and mentor undergraduate and graduate research students. careers.umassd.edu/en-us/job/52...
I noticed Google search is no longer reliable for quick unit conversions & calculations.
So I built a simple online calculator
Give it a spin: pmocz.github.io/online-unit-...
Definitely one way to run out of Gauss.
Generative AI is rapidly progressing and threatens to inundate us. A new paper (including my old Caltech classmate Serge Belognie) utilizes noise-encoded illumination to “watermark” live video. It offers some hope for those concerned for team reality. arxiv.org/abs/2507.23002 h/t @truesciphi.org
![[neon rainbow pattern background]
THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME
The universe reimagined -- through pop culture, poetry, and theoretical physics.
From the award-winning author of The Disordered Cosmos
image of the cover of the book which features circular artwork in the center, one half of it a black and white pattern and the other half a neon rainbow pattern
PREORDER NOW Coming 4/7/26
image of the Pantheon logo](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3le7dvxqc2rhvyswiida2cgf/bafkreidgvaf7urf7fyxvd7k3ocfcnpkiz7gjhupwaexen5fqodefyqphze)
📣📣 BOOK NEWS 📣📣
I'm excited to share the cover and release date of Book #2, #EdgeOfSpaceTime, which is now available for PREORDER!!
You can order from ANY bookstore, including your local indie!
More details on preordering here:
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746817...
What's the book about? 🧵
It's always great to see the successes of former students. Postdoc Chris Byrohl @cbyrohl.bsky.social, whom I've known he was an undergraduate, published an amazing paper this week on his new GPU accelerated Ly-α radiative transfer code THOR Hugely impressive results! arxiv.org/abs/2507.11603
Definitely a huge challenge but I know we will eventually get there. It's something I also confronted when teaching math methods; software systems have been better at doing integrals than introductory students for decades, but that doesn't mean we have stopped teaching calculus.
They are extremely useful for many tasks -- from generating comments to code or git commits to developing perfectly formatted figures. But they are improving so rapidly we cannot really ignore them. A new generation of agentic tools like Claude Code are already here.
Experimenting with the @anthropic.com Claude Code command line beta. In some ways, it is a natural extension of the familiar chat LLM interface. In others, it offers a brief glimpse of more agentic AIs to come -- building and running code and analyzing results largely on its own.
¡Todavía tengo el vinilo original!
Really cool opportunity for advanced grad students and postdocs to learn about and discuss multi-messenger astrophysics in beautiful Santa Cruz! (featuring yours truly)
Hope the historic Orrery made the cut!
My research group alumna, Mckenzie Ferrari has made her debut contribution to the astronomy reader's digest Astrobites! In her engaging review, Mckenzie dives into a paper exploring the origins of astronomical candles that shine a bit too brightly. aasnova.org/2025/04/08/s... 🔭🧪
This looks cool!! The postdocs and students at @hitsters.bsky.social developed a Habitable board game last year while I was there. There was a limited run of physical copies, but there is a version available online for free. tabletopia.com/games/habita...
The ESA Gaia mission mapped out the positions and velocities of over a billion stars in our galaxy and led directly to dozens of breakthrough investigations in stellar astrophysics. Godspeed.
When I was a teaching assistant for Alex Filippenko’s large introductory astronomy course, Alex solicited us (the TAs) for exam questions. The end product was some combination of the best questions from both Alex and the TAs.
Kramers and Holst (1923) captures the brief "old quantum mechanics" of Bohr and Sommerfeld in beautiful illustrations. archive.org/details/atom... Ht/Paul Prudence
Pre-tenure: ~ 1 course per semester. Post-tenure: ~ 1 course / 5 years.
I usually do this as a homework assignment, but it could work in-class: given stellar data, “discover” the HR diagram by plotting mags and then abs mags versus colors. Also interactively see the difference between a magnitude and volume limited sample.
Indeed, we had a preview of what a sudden endowment shortfall looks like — Harvard for instance couldn’t even afford to put breakfast on the table for their students. That is precisely their goal here.
Very cool, thanks!
Is this a Seestar?
There's actually quite a literature surrounding hypothetical "neutrino balls," going back at least to Holdom, 1987 (journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...).
OS/X (both Intel and silicon) is currently supported, but only minor tweaks will be needed for Windows. github.com/rtfisher/sni...
The requisite legacy PGPLOT library is automatically downloaded and installed with X-Windows interface support. The container hosts the X11 server which the user can easily connect to via a local X11 client on their desktop. The best part is this is all accomplished by running a single script.
I’ve written a short Docker file to easily enable anyone to run Blondin & Tonry’s SuperNova IDentification (SNID) code on almost any platform. (1/2)