Tom Rivlin

UK gets first female Astronomer Royal in 350 years Prof Michele Dougherty is the first woman to be appointed to the influential post.

Congrats to Professor Michele Dougherty on being my Differential Equations lecturer in second year undergrad in 2012.

Oh, and maybe some other more recent achievement of hers IDK www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Next, huge thanks to my co-authors Veronika and Sophie, the former a world-class WF expert who agreed to work with me on this (and patiently explain how WF actually works), and the latter a maths and coding whiz who helped a lot with the numerics. Check it all out here:

arxiv.org/abs/2507.21221

Some credits: First, it wouldn't be a Wigner's Friend paper without a cute cartoon showing W and F looking at stuff, and for our work I'm super grateful to the curliest of qubits himself, Jake Xuereb @curlyqubit.bsky.social, for providing gorgeous sketches, as seen above.

Next, we all have that one friend who's just a small collection of qubits, right? Well here we numerically studied what happens to the WF effects as the friend increases in size, finding a form of 'emegence of classicality' as the WF effects faded away.

We also applied our model to the fancy Extended Wigner's Friend Scenarios that everyone's talking about, likewise finding that the model obfuscates genuine effects like the famous Local Friendliness violations.

We found our model produces a new type of Wigner's Friend disagreement (or 'paradox') using coherence between the friend and the environment. But this new effect is hard to tell apart from some more mundane sources of error that arise when complicating the WF setup.

Emergence of Classicality in Wigner's Friend Scenarios The Wigner's Friend (WF) thought experiment concerns quantum measurements by a 'superobserver' of an observer measuring a quantum system. Variations on the setup and its extended versions have seen a ...

New preprint! Really excited about this. It's some of my best work ever, IMO: an analytic and numerical study of the Wigner's Friend problem(s) with a specific model of the measurement process and a decohering environment.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.21221

YouTube video by SciShow What’s the Largest Sofa You Can Move Around a Corner?

Ha, this is fun. Four years ago I wrote a SciShow that mentioned the famous unsolved "Moving Sofa" problem. But last year someone claimed to have finally solved it. So now, SciShow made a new video about it!

New video:
youtu.be/GeJEJXqf2XI?...

My older video:
youtu.be/3b6zvcqbNa0?...

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.

Great article
www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

Oh and it's also the second episode in a row of mine that hinged on the definition of Shannon entropy in linguistics!

bsky.app/profile/tomr...

YouTube video by SciShow These Scrolls Got Destroyed by a Volcano, But It’s Fine

Between this episode and last year's Vesuvius scrolls episode, SciShow has got me writing lots about the really cool science behind deciphering ancient texts. Super fun stuff!

youtu.be/qjmhtHYa2aQ?...

YouTube video by SciShow This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

New @scishow.bsky.social

This was a really fun one. We wrote about the real science behind an ancient tome said to hold alchemical secrets... And just what does Shannon entropy have to do with it?

youtu.be/K0wVcFXNXLw?...

Really enjoyed this series of mini essays on social democracy

Quite enjoyed this piece!

Mission Impossible good.

As quantum mechanics turns 100, a new revolution is under way With greater control over the quantum realm, physicists are poised to make major leaps in quantum computing, quantum gravity and more.

To us, every year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, but it's nice that it's official now...

And this week, Marcus spoke to esteemed science journo Emily Conover about the future of quantum theory, with some hot takes 👀

www.sciencenews.org/article/quan...

YouTube video by SciShow What’s The Fastest Language?

New SciShow! Really pleased with this one. Had a lot of fun researching and writing it. It turns out that basically every language has almost the exact same bit rate. What's up with that? Find out here:
youtu.be/suEm3uFJA2s?...

This project is coming along nicely it seems
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Damn.

Philosophy of science by the thermal bath swimming pool. Not a bad weekend in Bad Blumau 😎

YouTube video by Peacock Poker Face Season 2 | Official Trailer | Peacock Original

TV is back, baby
youtu.be/mlrQBK8h2AE?...

My main complaint with Paddington 3 is that in the film where a bear looks for El Dorado in Peru, they missed the opportunity to have a pun on "oro" vs "oso"

A proud older brother making an embarrassed younger brother take credit for his hard work ❤️

Here's a link to all my scishow videos. Number 60 is coming up soon and it's one of my favourites I've ever worked on!
youtube.com/playlist?lis...

YouTube video by SciShow What’s Below Absolute Zero?

New SciShow! It's a topic close to my own work in quantum thermo. You've probably heard that absolute zero is the lowest possible temperature... But controversially, some claim that temperatures lower than zero are possible in some cases. Here's how it works:

youtu.be/KHVEwTMA19M?...

Sigh, it's that time again

A “thoughtful” Local Friendliness no-go theorem: a prospective experiment with new assumptions to suit Howard M. Wiseman, Eric G. Cavalcanti, and Eleanor G. Rieffel, Quantum 7, 1112 (2023). A recent paper by two of us and co-workers [1], based on an extended Wigner's friend scenario, demonstrated that ...

Worth noting that recent _Extended_ Wigner's Friend papers have led to a mini revival of this: it's claimed that sometimes an agent needs to actually have a model of quantum theory in their "mind" for paradoxes to happen (I work on this stuff and I'm sceptical!)
quantum-journal.org/papers/q-202...

‘The worse the world gets, the better for this play’: Armando Iannucci on staging Dr Strangelove with Steve Coogan Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black comedy about nuclear armageddon was once called ‘sick’. Iannucci explains why – in the age of Trump, Putin and Musk – this madcap story is as relevant as ever

I went to a cinema screening of this and it was fun! The eerie timeliness of e.g. the conspiracist general was both comic and chilling, the performances are all great, and Iannucci mostly succeeds in seamlessly blending new lines into the original script

www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/o...

Research Fellow in Theoretical Molecular Physics/Astrophysics at UCL Apply now for the Research Fellow in Theoretical Molecular Physics/Astrophysics role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.

The group I did my PhD with in London is advertising a postdoc position. I can 100% vouch for them being a lovely lot of people to work with, and UCL was a great work environment when I was there

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMJ551/r...

Is dark energy getting weaker? Fresh data bolster shock finding Physicists had long assumed that the elusive force has constant strength. But the latest results from a project to map the Universe’s expansion challenge this idea.

But potentially even more interesting is a new study that claims fairly compelling evidence that the cosmological constant is changing over time -- a huge result if true www.nature.com/articles/d41...