Dan Falk

Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard? | Quanta Magazine Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.

First column for Quanta Magazine's new essay section, Qualia.

I take stock of particle physics, a field in crisis. What happened, and what now? Commentary here from many angles.

Please lmk your thoughts, or any tips or topic ideas I should look into. 🙏

www.quantamagazine.org/is-particle-...

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The hand-cranked calculator invented by a Nazi concentration camp prisoner For two decades, the Curta was the best portable calculator in the world.

Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark, born #OTD in 1902, is remembered for his invention of the tiny "Curta" portable calculator -- based on an idea that came to him while imprisoned at Buchenwald. I wrote about his remarkable life a while back for @arstechnica.com: arstechnica.com/science/2021...

The Mythology Of Conscious AI | NOEMA Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

"If we conflate the richness of biological brains and human experience with the information-processing machinations of deepfake-boosted chatbots... we do our minds, brains and bodies a grave injustice" -- @anilseth.bsky.social, "The Mythology of Conscious AI":
www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...

This reminds me of the revenge attacks on stingrays following the death of Steve Irwin in 2006 (weirdly, also in Australia).

Rob Sawyer delivering his talk on Friday evening.

Rob Sawyer signing copies of his books and chatting with his fans after his talk on Friday evening.

An excellent talk by @robertjsawyer.com, titled “New Life and New Civilizations: A Science Fiction Perspective on Exobiology,” at Mississauga RASC (at UTM) on Friday evening. 🪐👽🐉

(FWIW, Wookiepedia says they did…)

I’ve asked this before, but perhaps not on this platform: Didn’t tauntauns *evolve* on Hoth?

Thanks for this! :)

This helps me understand the meaning of “royal peculiar,” as in (per the Wiki entry for Westminster Abbey): “The monastery was dissolved in 1559, and the church was made a royal peculiar – a Church of England church, accountable directly to the sovereign – by Elizabeth I.”

That seems like a good answer — indeed, a lot rests on what type of conversation one is hoping to have. (I was thinking, we “know” some of Hammurabi’s thoughts, so with some effort we should be ok at least that far back… but I wonder how we’d fare with, say, Neolithic folks…)

Let’s say you’re a linguist with a time machine. You can go back in time with a small team of colleagues, and some notepads and such. What’s the furthest back you could plausibly go, and (after a period of adjustment) still have a real conversation with the locals?

But seriously, I re-watched a Stones doc a while back, and the questions from journalists (at least in the early days) were just the saddest thing ever. Like, “So, you’re not the Beatles, is that right?” or “What’s it like to not be the Beatles?” (I’m only exaggerating a little.)

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MWI? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On a side note, whenever I read the line “…gyre and gimble in the wabe…”, this is exactly what I picture.

A scene from The Beatles Anthology — we see Paul and George on stage, singing She Loves You.

A scene from The Beatles Anthology — we see a woman in the audience, enjoying the band’s performance of She Loves You.

Enjoying Episode 2 of you know what. 🎸🎶

Cool — I’ll take a look!

4/3 And while Sean knows infinitely more than me about, well, stuff, it gives me a warm feeling to know that I apparently encountered Terry Bisson's "They're Made of Meat" before him. (I first came across it in Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works [1997].) 🥩 🧠 🤖

The Mythology Of Conscious AI | NOEMA Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

3/3 Anil's essay: www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...; Sean & Ned's Mindscape episode: www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026... #science #philosophy #consciousness

2/3 ...but @anilseth.bsky.social says something almost identical in his recent Noema essay ("Digital computers and brains differ fundamentally in how they relate to time...There could be a microsecond or a million years... and it would still be the same algorithm, the same computation.")

1/3 Enjoying @seanmcarroll.bsky.social's "Mindscape" episode with Ned Block (@neddo.bsky.social). At one point Sean is trying to remember who said that LLMs don't experience the passage of time (a point he strongly agrees with). I don't know who specifically said *that*, but (cont'd)

Many congrats!! I will read the essay with interest!

A paragraph from a magazine article in which the author describes the supposed levitating of a 17th century Italian friar, Joseph of Cupertino.

It’s 2026, so I guess let’s take St. Joseph’s levitations seriously

Ah! Well, I like History Extra — reliably interesting episodes, expert guests, solidly produced, and frequent new episodes. I also like Stuff You Missed in History Class, and Short History Of, and (with a comedic element) You’re Dead to Me. (There are prob a zillion others that I don’t know about.)

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I’ll have to think about that. (The second part of the quote, about NH winter, seems fine. You’d think SH summer would also have to be shorter…)

What is perihelion? Here's what happens when Earth is nearest to the sun Here's how the astronomical phenomenon influences our planet—from the length of our seasons to the way Earth moves through space.

Happy perihelion everyone! www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

A paragraph from p.31 of the current issue of Harper’s — an article on the quest to build humanoid robots, by James Vincent.

Here’s another snippet from @jjvincent.bsky.social ‘s excellent @harpers.bsky.social feature on humanoid robots:

Ten Top Smithsonian Stories of 2025, From Eerie Clay Puppets With Detachable Heads to a New Look at the American Revolution The magazine’s most-read articles of the year included a deep dive on the Scopes "monkey trial," an interview with award-winning documentarians and a profile of quintuplets who found fame during the G...

Dan Falk (@danfalk.bsky.social)'s piece about the Scopes trial, which included comments from yours truly, was among Smithsonian magazine's top ten stories for 2025!