Mark Mitchison

Dreams - Su Shi (trans. Arthur Waley) Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister.

Here's a poem by one of the old Chinese scholar bureaucrats that I think captures a certain Vibe very well

ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds A new study has found that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT consistently advise women to ask for lower salaries than men.

Study finds A.I. LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. When prompted w/ a user profile of same education, experience & job role, differing only by gender, ChatGPT advised the female applicant to request $280K salary; Male applicant=$400K.
thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...

I hate when someone unearths my pube-autograph to the world's most famous pedophile while I'm dying of cankles

Picture of the metro map of Singapore

I very much appreciate a well organised metro map (Singapore MRT)

Rapid optimal work extraction from a quantum-dot information engine The realization and optimization of an information engine that allows work to be extracted from the measurement of thermal fluctuations is studied. The optimization enables maximal work extraction and...

Very happy to see this theory-experiment collab published as a Letter in PRR journals.aps.org/prresearch/a... Thermodynamic control techniques used to perform optimal work extraction in a quantum dot, from the extremes of slow to fast driving! 🏎️⬅️🐢 💪

Scientists reportedly hiding AI text prompts in academic papers to receive positive peer reviews Research papers found carrying hidden white text giving instructions not to highlight negatives as concern grows over use of large language models for peer review Academics are reportedly hiding prompts in preprint papers for artificial intelligence tools, encouraging them to give positive reviews. Nikkei reported on 1 July it had reviewed research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries, including Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore and two in the United States. Continue reading...

Scientists reportedly hiding AI text prompts in academic papers to receive positive peer reviews

Please share to spread the word: There is an opportunity for a PhD studentship on the postquantum theory of gravity, or experimental tests of the quantum nature of spacetime. Deadline for UK students is Jan 31, while internationals should email today. Details at www.ucl.ac.uk/oppenheim/it... ⚛️ 🧪

Quality of scientific papers questioned as academics ‘overwhelmed’ by the millions published Mainstream mockery of AI-generated rat with giant penis in one paper brings problem to public attention

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

No UK government action against Twitter until Grok headlines the main stage at Glastonbury. At which point the BBC twitter account will be forcibly removed.

The rank hypocrisy of this, after all the outrage over Glastonbury. Absolute sheer disgusting state of it. I’m fuming 😡

I'm old enough to remember when the Prime Minister felt it was important to give us a running commentary of his thoughts on the entire Glastonbury lineup

If the Royal Society had decided to expel Elon Musk simply for violating their Code of Conduct, they wouldn't now face the embarrassment of having a Fellow who built MechanoHitler. Hey ho.

Wonderful to see this paper finally out in PRE! A great collaboration with @gtlandi.bsky.social and the QuSys group in Dublin. A trajectory-based method to study stochastic thermodynamics in open quantum systems at strong system-reservoir coupling:
journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

Mark on stage giving a talk at QTD 2025. The slide motivates why the audience of quantum thermodynamics researchers should be interested in clocks.

Very proud and honoured to kick off QTD Singapore 2025 with an invited talk! I attended my first QTD conference in Porquerolles 10 years ago: a career-changing moment where I found my community and cemented my love for the topic 🤓 I hope some of this year’s attendees get as much out of it as I did!

We were lucky enough to have our YouGov/The Economist poll in field when the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. You can see the partisan realignment in real time

Just click on this: skyviewer.app/explorer #RubinTelescope

If we regularly help the rest of the public feel some of the feelings that we feel -- which means admitting that science makes us feel things -- then that helps them understand why science matters so much to us scientists and see that they are key partners in the work that we do.

Great to have (most of!) the ToCQS group visiting me here at King’s. Saulo Moreira is currently telling us about his recent work on precision bounds for correlated currents in open quantum systems journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

Last chance to avail of the early bird registration discount for FLQT 2025, which ends this week!!

Séamas O’Reilly: Ballymena violence is the result of politics based on scapegoating any ‘other’ "The central perversity of treating these people as anything other than racist thugs is only more transparent in Ballymena because they have so few migrants that any other excuse is patently absurd."

Referring to events in Ballymena as "disturbances" is a euphemism too far. We are witnesses to a pogrom. And it behoves us to say so, loud and clear.

www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

Really happy to see the first ToCQS-Quantum Information group @tcddublin.bsky.social collab. out! 🤩 We show how correlations between multiple currents influence their fluctuations in Markovian open quantum systems @mitchison.bsky.social @felixbinder.bsky.social

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

Copyright by Alexander Rommel / TU Wien.

What started as informal discussions on the Danube beach in Vienna during QTD2023 has been published at last. Trying to come up with an experimentally feasible quantum clock we came across a rich model – the ring clock – that overturned a common wisdom in the community. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Amazing to see this paper by my collaborators finally out in Nature Physics — beautiful theory work led by @mathsmire.bsky.social that answers one of the main questions of our @aspects-quantum.bsky.social project, in a way that I did not expect! Now bring on the experiments 🧑‍🔬🤓

(1/7)On a train to Styria, headed for a weekend of hiking I kept thinking 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘢 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘣𝘦 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯?

In today's arXiv, I show that a heat exchange between a qubit and a thermal machine can be used to solve some old school query complexity problems.

scirate.com/arxiv/2505.1...

Yvette Cooper repeatedly refused to give a straight answer just now on Today to straight Q “Will councils get more money to pay care workers more?” She repeatedly committed to higher carer pay but wouldn’t commit to money so councils can fund it. Think that speaks volumes about the mess we are in.

Steady-state heat engines driven by finite reservoirs We provide a consistent thermodynamic analysis of stochastic thermal engines driven by finite-size reservoirs, which are in turn coupled to infinite-size reservoirs. We consider a cyclic operation mod...

Nanoscale thermal engines are usually assumed to be coupled to infinite reservoirs. What happens to their performance if they are instead driven by finite reservoirs, which are in turn coupled to infinite reservoirs? We looked into this in our new preprint 🧐 arxiv.org/abs/2505.05174

wow, looks like their aim really was to depopulate that country! - wow, looks like they really were a far-right party! - wow, looks like that ceo really was a fascist! look at us, forever surprised by the utterly obvious and avoidable emergence of existential threats! we came we saw we gawped!

Ah yes. “Vote for me because the alternative is far worse.” A strategy that has never failed in recent memory…. hmm wait a minute 🤔

Roadmap on Quantum Thermodynamics The last two decades has seen quantum thermodynamics become a well established field of research in its own right. In that time, it has demonstrated a remarkably broad applicability, ranging from prov...

Quantum thermodynamics: wanna know what all the fuss is about? Read on 👇
arxiv.org/abs/2504.20145
Special thanks to Steve Campbell and many other authors for the effort in putting this together!

Abstract submission deadline is this Thursday 1st May — don’t miss out!!