Will Thomas

Big deal in the science policy for physics world. DOE Office of Science has consolidated all its advisory committees into one. The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel dated back to 1967. www.aip.org/fyi/doe-cons...

On y aborde les questions suivantes:

un prix pour des méthodes? pour des conclusions sur les sources de la croissance? Pour des recommendations de politiques économique?

D'où vient ce prix qui n'est pas tout à fait un Nobel, à quoi sert-il dans le monde universitaire et la société?

Woah, Joel Mokyr gets the Nobel Prize for Economics. That's like a hair's breadth from giving it to historian of science & technology Margaret Jacob. Blogged a bit about them back in the day:
rational-action.com/etherwave/20...
rational-action.com/etherwave/20...

That's like four economics awards in a row with a substantial economic-history component, right? That strikes me as a remarkable shift. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists...

Manuel Sandoval Vallarta: The experiences of a transnational scientist in the US AIP History Weekly Edition: October 10, 2025

For Hispanic Heritage Month, Adriana Minor looks at Mexican physicist Manuel Sandoval Vallarta's career at MIT, where he strove to build scientific relations between the US and Latin America. He returned to Mexico during WW2 when asked to abandon that work to focus only on teaching duties. #HPS

<i>What Is Life?</i> Revisited Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - <i>What Is Life?</i> Revisited

My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell

More than 30% of this century’s science Nobel prizewinners immigrated: see their journeys The most common destination for eventual Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and medicine since 2000 is the United States, Nature has found.

You've probably heard how a high percentage of #Nobel laureates are immigrants. The US in particular has benefited from the influx of bright minds.

@jennaahart.bsky.social ran the data for this century's Nobel prizewinners — and shows more than 30% immigrated. 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Beyond Representation: On Being a Woman in Science in China | Made in China Journal In the autumn of 1995, Ye Shuhua made a speech. During the NGO Forum at the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, the 68-year-old astronomer took to the microphone and cal...

Thirty years after the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, the Chinese government is once again calling on women to serve the nation, this time in science and technology. In this essay, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social revisits a century of women in science in China, tracing their struggles and achievements.

Policy primer: A new $100,000 fee on H-1B Visas President Trump has issued a proclamation requiring a $100,000 payment for each new H-1B petition. We examine what it does and does not do, how it is being justified, and what developments to look out...

Glad you asked! www.aip.org/research/pol...

And Martinis? His dad was a refugee from Yugoslavia. repository.aip.org/node/129661

Ooh, nice one! Reminds me of @airminded.org

John Martinis on the advising style of fellow Nobel laureate John Clarke:

"He came into the lab and talked with you every day. At the time it was sometimes annoying, but looking back this was probably the single most important thing he did to train me as an experimentalist."

#NobelPrize

Michel Devoret also recalled John Clarke's "strict and intense training" in his 2021 @aip.bsky.social oral history interview:

"Basically, John Clarke was coming to see us every day in the lab and was asking, 'What is new today?'" He was both jovial and respectful, besides being demanding."

Congratulations to this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Be sure to check out our oral histories with:

John Martinis: repository.aip.org/node/129661

Michel Devoret: repository.aip.org/node/129778

Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August The data shows the steepest decline in August international student arrivals since the pandemic.

Remarkable stats here. Big year-over-year dropoff in international student arrivals, including a 44% dropoff from India. Smaller dropoff from China, but those numbers were already way down post-pandemic.

Adams, by the way, is fascinating. Not only did he not have a PhD, he had no university education whatsoever. Yet, he rose to become director of the UK's fusion research lab at Culham and a co-leader of CERN. 📷 © CERN #histsci #HPS royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

October 3, 2025 Article spotlight: Barbara Hof on CERN’s dalliance with fusion

In this week's AIP History Weekly Edition, we look at Barbara Hof's new article in BJHS on an unsuccessful push by British engineer John Adams to move @cern.bsky.social into fusion research. A footnote in CERN's history, the episode had lasting effects on the fusion landscape.

IBM Names New Director of IBM Research Arvind Krishna is pleased to share that Jay Gambetta will become Director of IBM Research effective October 1, 2025.

This is fun, Jay Gambetta is the new head of IBM Research. He did his PhD on quantum interpretations and got into quantum computing because he thought it was a good way to figure out which interpretation is right! From my oral history with him: repository.aip.org/gambetta-jay...

My hot take on the Turing Test: it's pretty wild how computers' ability to at-least-sort-of pass it seems to have had a huge effect on the psychology of human relations with their machines. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" and all that.

Jane Goodall, primatologist and friend to chimpanzees, dies at 91 She used her global fame to draw attention to the plight of dwindling chimpanzee populations and, more broadly, to the perils of environmental destruction.

An icon

I like how the impression here is of the hurricanes approaching the US and basically taking a look and saying, "woah, let's get outta here" www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025...

Contemporary Science Fiction and The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics This book seeks to create a new means of interrogating the direction in which contemporary science fiction is progressing.In the late 1950s, Hugh Everett III su…

Book comes out tomorrow! I'm terrified and excited.

LFG.

www.bloomsbury.com/us/contempor...

A green space with bushes and trees and a helix sculpture next to a beige building.

After a long hiatus, AIP's postdoc position for historians of the physical sciences is back!

3 years, $77,500 per year + benefits. Work in the Washington, DC area, close to Univ of Maryland. Open to US citizens/permanent residents. Apply by Nov. 15! #histsci

workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...

This is the list I've always wanted.

September 2025 AIP History September Update

Lots of updates and opportunities in this month's @aip.bsky.social history monthly newsletter! Learn about some new photo collections, grants for archives and historians of science, and articles on a number of major history of science exhibitions and programs www.aip.org/history/aip-...

A green space with bushes and trees and a helix sculpture next to a beige building.

After a long hiatus, AIP's postdoc position for historians of the physical sciences is back!

3 years, $77,500 per year + benefits. Work in the Washington, DC area, close to Univ of Maryland. Open to US citizens/permanent residents. Apply by Nov. 15! #histsci

workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...

SOFIA: A NASA History Office Report - NASA This report by Lois R. Rosson is the first retrospective look at SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, since the mission’s conclusion in 2022.

My former student wrote a history of the SOFIA airborne observatory...check out her work :)

www.nasa.gov/history/sofia/

Sudden policy change from NSF, saying only 1st year PhD students, or earlier, can apply to the GRFP. Second years are out of luck. (I got a GRF as a 2nd-year applicant, and it very much turbocharged my dissertation work; much more valuable than if I'd had it while still doing my coursework.)

Text clip: "The memo appears to reflect the Trump administration’s hard turn against certain STEM education programs and diversity initiatives. An earlier memo published during Trump’s first term overtly called for agencies to prioritize “activities that advance innovation in STEM education and increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM.” This objective is ridiculed in the latest memo, and the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive campaign to eliminate grants, programs, and policies that have even passing connections to DEI."

Good for FYI to point this out, from the latest OSTP/OMB R&D priorities memo. I think it's important to retain the memory that five years ago DEI wasn't even controversial. www.aip.org/fyi/ai-and-q...

Nineteen sixty-four – CERN Courier Michael Riordan chronicles 1964, the year that saw the birth of the quark model, the Higgs mechanism, and the discovery of CP violation and the cosmic microwave background.

Just caught Michael Riordan's @cerncourier.bsky.social piece on the year 1964 in particle physics. Sometimes physics takes eons to progress, and sometimes it trips ahead with dizzying speed.