Mark Mitchison

The physics of the cell surface: from molecular rules to cell-scale behaviour at King’s College London on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - The physics of the cell surface: from molecular rules to cell-scale behaviour at King’s College London, listed on FindAPhD.com

I am recruiting a #PhDstudent in Computational #Biophysics at @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social @kingslsm.bsky.social for October! Deadline February 28.

Details 👉 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Please share with interested students!
#PhD #PhDposition #PhDSky #AcademicSky #computationalphysics 🧪⚛️

Hey quantum Bluesky! Allow us to reintroduce ourselves! You may know us as QuIT: Marcus Huber's Quantum Information and Thermodynamics group at TU Wien. But we're so much more than that, and it's time our name reflected it.

So say hello to... 𝗤𝘂𝗢𝗜?

quoi-theory.at

OOPS.

As someone who uses ChatGPT for zero things whatsoever, the fact that they're putting ads in it is extremely funny

Cracking the limits of clocks: a new uncertainty relation for time itself – Physics World Physicists uncover a universal limit on timekeeping precision, proving that anything from heartbeats to ocean waves can be a clock – but none escape the noise

Researchers uncover a fundamental, universal limit to how precisely time can be measured in noisy, fluctuating systems. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/cracking-t...

Our work modelling heat engines driven by finite reservoirs has been published in PRE! 
What I really like about this work is that the reservoir's entropic temperature takes centre stage to explain stochastic engines’ performance🔥

journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

I am tired of Earth. These people.

Chicken mappas (a kind of curry) and appam (a fluffy rice-based savoury pancake)

Merry Xmas BlueSky!! Breakfast today is chicken mappas and appam… They know how to celebrate in Kerala 🤩🎄

Hey! Our work made the list! Adding it to my CV

Bitter fight over 2020 Microsoft quantum paper both resolved and unresolved --The Register, 31 Jul 2025

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (July)

Upward trend in percentage of women physics and astronomy faculty in US

Women made up 21% of faculty members in US physics departments in 2024, up from 16% a decade earlier. The percentage of women faculty members in the nation’s astronomy departments rose from 19% in 2014 to 25% in 2024. #academia #womeninscience #faculty

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers
www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

Enough of this finite initial segment nonsense. A number is even if there is no remainder when divided by 2. \Aleph_0 = 2 \Aleph_0, so by cardinality, there is an even number of naturals *and* an even number of integers. And even if there was one more, that would still be an even number!

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

This is grossly asymmetrical and wrong. There are N positive numbers from 1 to N, and another N negative numbers from -1 to -N. Including 0, that makes 2N+1 numbers (for arbitrarily large N). I rest my case.

This is the saddest day of my professional life. Today is not only the final recording of the latest series of The Infinite Monkey Cage, it is my last ever Monkey Cage. I never thought that I would have to leave the show. I always imagined going on until | dropped dead under the studio lights due to a brain aneurysm caused by my final attempt to understand notions of quantum gravity or the shock of being told about fly maggot infestations in the sacks of macaque monkeys. I resigned in September, after sixteen years of dedication to the show, A show that I named and helped develop over all those years. Unfortunately, my opinions outside the BBC have been considered problematic for sometime, whether it has been voicing support for the trans community, criticism of Donald Trump, numerous other outlandish opinions, including once gently criticising Stephen Fry. These things were considered to conflict with being a freelance BBC science presenter

In a recent meeting where BBC Studio executives again voiced problems with me, I realised my choices. Obedience and being quieter to remain making Monkey Cage, or 'Resign and have the freedom to speak out against what I believe are injustices'. • I chose the latter. It broke my heart. I love this show and I love the audience, and it is because of the audience in particular, that this decision was so difficult to make. I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness, empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer. I felt I couldn't pamper myself with the luxury of silence. One of my many privileges is that I am able to resign and I can speak out even if it is to the detriment of my career.

I have thought a lot about my heroes, Sinead O Connor, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and so many more. I think of Sinead's words, "the job of an artist is to be themselves at any cost". James Baldwin said prejudice was really just a word for cowardice. Audre Lorde, viewing her life, wrote that her only regrets were her silences. I think of my father as I resign, he brought me up to believe in fairness , justice and kindness. Though my heart is broken, it is also full of fire. I apologise to our incredible listeners for my departure, your love of the show means a great deal. I am so sorry to let you down. I hope that you can understand my reasoning. I have to accept that I am not what the current BBC expects of their freelance presenters.

Despite this I should add that I have always worked far more than my contracted hours to try and ensure the show was always the best it could be, as well as making myself accessible and responsive to the audience wherever and whenever I met them. Every night, we have recorded, I have been filled with determination to make the best show possible. This was not "just a job" I hope that with my departure I can be a better ally to the LGBTQ community, to the neurodivergent community, to activists fighting against those who aim to brutalise society, to those currently in prison on hunger strike, and to all those who fight for a more inclusive world. From many conversations, I know there are many Monkey Cage listeners who support these communities and activists too. The strawberry is dead. Long live the strawberry. B

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

Man, I hadn't thought about this as a consequence of LLM use. The first "theory of everything" I ever received was in grad school and I suspect it was probably because I was early in the alphabet at MIT. That one didn't strike me as reflecting any particularly disordered thinking... <1/n> 🧵

Covid inquiry live: ‘Inexcusable’ delays under Johnson led to 23,000 deaths Lockdowns may have been avoided if Boris Johnson’s government had acted faster, damning report finds

Having Johnson & Cummings in Downing Street when Covid struck was, just like Brexit, an entirely avoidable disaster caused largely by utterly appalling journalism. And now exactly the same clowns, arses & bigots with bylines are rolling out the red carpet for Farage.
www.thetimes.com/article/1b15...

Couldn't be more proud of this collab! Watch out for Quantum Quest in Portuguese, Gujarati, and Hindi 🐈‍⬛

A picture of 9 people who contributed to making Quantum Quest, standing in front of a large poster with AMBER written on it, and including the cartoon characters Alice, Bob and Cat.

Here’s the whole crew at the film’s world premiere at AMBER research centre last week 🥰

Cassette Vision The official project page for the animation film "Quantum Quest"

Last week I witnessed the birth of a new animation phenomenon: Quantum Quest! Born out of a collab between @aspects-quantum.bsky.social @khalak.bsky.social @saulovmo.bsky.social and our talented friends at Cassette Vision — watch here! cassette.ie/quantum

We cooked up the idea for this experiment over a very fine dinner at our first full @aspects-quantum.bsky.social consortium meeting in Murcia, almost 2.5 years ago. Just shows the importance of good company, free conversation, and some good food 🥘🧁 and wine 🍷 for the scientific and creative process!

Huge thanks to @aspects-quantum.bsky.social partners @naresgroup.bsky.social @quitphysics.info and especially Vivek Wadhia and @mathsmire.bsky.social who really pushed this project from its conception to completion. It’s wonderful to see it all finally come to fruition. ❤️

An interesting implication is that, to make timekeeping efficient in the quantum domain, we should try to avoid measuring the ticks! It’s better to couple the clock directly to whatever system it needs to regulate.

The Costs of Quantum Timekeeping Experiments reveal the surprisingly large amount of entropy—and thus heat—generated by a clock that could be part of a quantum processor.

They showed that, for a quantum clock, the entropic cost of recording the ticks dominates the cost of generating them by many orders of magnitude. This not only resolves the paradox of “equilibrium clocks”, but also holds true in the optimal case where the clockwork itself is far from equilibrium

A picture showing a quantum clock (left) driven by a thermal gradient, whose ticks are transitions between microscopic quantum states. Reading out these transitions requires an active tick sensor, which produces a large amount of entropy per tick of the clock.

But can a clock—which distinguishes past from future—be truly reversible? Of course not! The resolution is that monitoring equilibrium fluctuations requires a detector that is out of equilibrium, producing entropy. Our friends @naresgroup.bsky.social showed this in a proof-of-principle experiment.

You can turn any random sequence of events into a clock A set of mathematical equations can help turn apparently random observations into a clock – and then measure its accuracy

This reflects a general feature of stochastic clocks, as my colleagues and I showed here doi.org/10.1103/rpls...
The optimal observable to estimate time is time-reversal symmetric: it doesn’t care about the direction of time’s arrow, only its length
www.newscientist.com/article/2439...

Even a system in equilibrium fluctuates. If we monitor those fluctuations, we see a time-varying signal that marks the passage of time. This poses a paradox because equilibrium fluctuations produce no entropy. It seems that a clock can operate reversibly! doi.org/10.1103/Phys...

Very happy to see our latest work out in PRL doi.org/10.1103/5rtj... and highlighted by both @apsphysics.bsky.social Physics and @physicsworld.bsky.social
Small thread below 🧵⬇️

Is there a prominent Brexiter left who hasn’t torn off their mask to reveal the rancid racism beneath? Boris Johnson’s chief fluffer accusing anyone else of being over-promoted is peak process. The bitterness of insanely privileged men with empty souls knows no bounds.