Andrew Higgins

Mount Baker and Lions Gate Bridge, viewed from Cypress Mountain, Vancouver.

The magic of leaving Vancouver Island at sunset on @bcferries.bsky.social.

Props to Long Beach Surf Shop for the expert kit and local wisdom. Every session was saltwater joy. Until next time, Tofino.

My third sabbatical in a row with convenient access to field sites for nonlinear wave studies! #LiveToSurf

Welcome to General Fusion, Dr. Andrew Higgins!    General Fusion and McGill University have collaborated for over a decade, and we’re thrilled to welcome McGill Professor Andrew Higgins to our team… |... Welcome to General Fusion, Dr. Andrew Higgins!    General Fusion and McGill University have collaborated for over a decade, and we’re thrilled to welcome McGill Professor Andrew Higgins to our team du...

Big new (at least for me): I’m on sabbatical leave from McGill this year and working full-time with General Fusion in Vancouver. With 2026 shaping up to be a pivot year for commercial fusion, I’m excited to be on-site and contributing directly to the effort.

Unfiltered glimpses of our solar system revealed through raw, breathtaking images. Our group works with one goal in mind: to someday capture such images from other solar systems.

A $100-Million Mission to Another Star Just Disappeared An abandoned plan to visit another star highlights the perils of billionaire-funded science

“How a Billionaire’s Plan to Reach Another Star Fell Apart”
Our group is still at it, stubbornly in the trenches, steadily chipping away at the key problems that must be solved to reach the nearest stars. The work continues. Onward!
www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

YouTube video by Netflix A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE | Official Teaser | Netflix

Forty-two years ago, “The Day After” reshaped public discourse around the possibility of nuclear war, even profoundly influencing the sitting U.S. President. Can we hope that, in the hands of a gifted director like Bigelow, such impact might be felt again?
youtu.be/0w6wUqWU3yU?...

If you can solve these issues with electromagnetic launchers, deep-pocketed people should be pounding a path to your door and dumping truckloads of money in your driveway. (FLF comes to mind.)

I think the limitations on coilguns are more significant than just the engineering of ancillary systems like storage and cooling. Hint on the keywords to search in the literature: “armature capture” (i.e., coilguns often turn into decelerators as projectile velocities exceed 1 km/s).

“I would bet good money the primary issue here is zero real interest…” During the peak of SDI in the 1980s, plenty of funding was poured into the correct talent (including at LANL), but no clear path to achieving speeds beyond a few km/s was ever found.

I believe there are fundamental challenges to EM launch, which are fundamentally different from those involved in accelerating charged particles. Coilguns rely on mutual inductance between the drive coil and the projectile, leading to issues such as current ramping, back-EMF, and precise timing.

This isn't my wheelhouse, but I've followed the development of EM launchers for 35 years, having read every volume of the proceedings from the International Symposia on Electromagnetic Launch Technology forwards and backwards.

“6 km/s was supposedly easily achievable.”
Yet, more than 30 years later, wasn’t achieved.

I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding. The “Mozart of Math” tried to stay out of politics. Then it came for his research.

I wrote an op-ed on the world-class STEM research ecosystem in the United States, and how this ecosystem is now under attack on multiple fronts by the current administration: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

Congratulations to Space Concordia Rocketry Division on the successful launch of Starsailor, featuring the largest student-built bipropellant rocket engine ever flown (35 kN thrust). The launch occurred approximately 1 hr 16 mins into the livestream linked below.
www.youtube.com/live/610YciE...

We're reading (and hoping for a successful flyby target🤞🤞):
"An Extremely Deep Rubin Survey to Explore the Extended Kuiper Belt and Identify Objects Observable by New Horizons" by @megschwamb.bsky.social
doi.org/10.3847/1538...

Why were we able to see the spiral rocket plume last night, but not during other rocket launches?

The time of day, the Sun’s light, and the direction the rocket heads into space causes this effect…

This is not the quality of pseudoscience infotainment to which I have grown accustomed Teasing the public with fraudulent or self-deluded promises of aliens used to mean something. It took work. It meant slapping together…

I have a complaint about Avi Loeb's latest work and I want to speak to management.

medium.com/@steve.desch...

A Saturn mass gas giant may be orbiting Alpha Centauri A, based on solid JWST infrared results and exhaustive simulations of its orbit. It's still a candidate rather than a confirmed world, but follow-up work will tell us soon. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/08/08/a...

If the sole purpose of attending the conference in person is to catch up with your former PhD students, it would still be worth it. #ICDERS2025

The infamous lecture hall at the University of Ottawa that requires every answer to be in the form of a question.

I’ve come to believe that the secret sauce of being an experimentalist lies in those long, tedious hours in the lab—they grant you the luxury of time and focus needed to fully immerse yourself in the experiment.

Thankfully, my current students indulge me and never ask, “Professor Higgins, why are you wasting your time? I can laser-cut dozens of diaphragms for you in minutes.”

34 years ago this month, I arrived in graduate school to join a gas dynamics lab. On my very first day, I was handed a pair of scissors and a roll of Mylar and told to start cutting diaphragms. 34 years later, I’m still at it.

Those moments when the city just hits different. #Montreal

Our group focuses on near-term technologies for the first robotic forays beyond our solar system. But it’s worth addressing the oft-repeated claim: “The speed of light is a hard limit: You can’t travel to the stars in a lifetime, so it won’t happen. [1/9]

Our students achieved another successful high-altitude balloon flight last night in collaboration with @uvic.ca and with support from the CSA’s FAST program. Onward and upward!

If 3I/ATLAS felt like a wake-up call, you haven’t been paying attention. Every year, we discover a dozen or so previously unknown comets—some larger than 3I/ATLAS—on trajectories that cross Earth’s orbit, often with minimal warning. /5

Again, we are finding comets in the inner solar system *all* *the* *time*, like once a week: Check the real-time image gallery from the SOHO solar observatory and you'll find comets in many of the images:
soho.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/ /4