Raphael Bousso

New Trump Banner Hung on Justice Department Headquarters

Pyongyang! Right here at home! This will be even better when they gild the columns

Yoon Suk Yeol: South Korea’s ex-president jailed for life for masterminding an insurrection Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached and indicted for declaring martial law in 2024.

Is this what a robust democracy looks like? Asking for a friend

Opinion | ‘Kristi Noem Needs To Go.’ Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis.

"An extrajudicial execution by security forces. This is where we are: armed agents of the state killing civilians with an apparent belief in their total impunity."

Opinion | The Trump Administration Is Lying to Our Faces. Congress Must Act.

"The administration is urging Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. Ms. Noem and Mr. Bovino are lying in defiance of obvious truths. They are lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power."

Minneapolis Live Updates: State Seeks Access to Evidence as Federal Officials Blame Shooting Victim

Utterly inhumane behaviour. "In sworn court filings, a doctor who offered to render aid to Mr. Pretti described how agents initially hesitated and asked him for proof of a medical license."
www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

— W.H. Auden, Sept. 1, 1939

Masked government agents are conducting “show me your papers” stops, detaining 5-year-olds to use them as bait, and brutally murdering U.S. citizens.

Call it what it is — fascism.

History will not look fondly on politicians and so-called "leaders" of this country who stood by and enabled this.

Column | The abhorrent power of the photograph of a 5-year-old held by ICE An image like this could once change history. Can one still?

“They weaponized decency, the last incorruptible defense we have against absolute misery and evil.”

Opinion | Trump’s Norway Letter Proves This Isn’t Sustainable

"We have three years left with a mad king. It does not feel sustainable."

ICE detains four children from Minnesota school district, including 5-year-old Columbia Heights Public Schools district officials accused ICE officers of using the 5-year-old “as bait.” A 10-year-old and her mother were also detained.

Great work deporting those dangerous criminals. Brave ICE heroes putting themselves in harm's way for our protection

Opinion | Trump’s Politics Are Not America First. They’re Me First.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/o...

Classic Onion Headline, except it’s in The NY Times

Hmm. The best evidence that dark energy is evolving rather than constant just got a little weaker.

The statistical significance of observational results don’t really have “momentum,” but we’ll have to continue to wait and see about this one.

Congratulations to my wonderful colleague John Clarke! And to Berkeley, and to UC. And to everyone who still believes that foundational research is worth investing in

3 new Physics Nobel Laureates from the University of California! 🥂🤙 (and one less parking space for the rest of us at Berkeley 🙃)

Everything is completely normal. Nothing to see here

Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches.

Industrial scale corruption
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

Far Out | Sean M. Carroll, Willa Glickman As scientists and researchers make sense of some of the major discoveries from the turn of the twenty-first century, “the present moment in the science of

“The damage that has been done to our world-leading scientific research infrastructure will take decades to repair, if we are ever able to.”

YouTube video by Wonderfest Science Gravity as a Quantum Computer – Dr. Raphael Bousso (UC Berkeley)

A public lecture/fireside chat at a pub in Marin, hosted by Wonderfest

The worst prediction in the history of science New scientific accounts of the universe are expected to fit with observation and predicted results from established theories. But at the heart of modern physics, there's reason to think this is not th...

(Hint: bad but probably not the worst. Also, we do have a solution.)

On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of children he killed?

U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Chinese Students, Rubio Says

Rubio just told 275000 people who did nothing wrong that he plans to destroy everything they worked for their entire life. This is utter madness and depravity

Ask ChatGPT! But here what we need is the "generalized" second law, which involves areas of causal horizons. The GSL is a conjecture. If it was false, then ordinary thermodynamics would become meaningless if black holes exist. And we have considerable evidence by now for the existence of black holes

If you don't take this limit, then the battle is veiled in fog. It's harder to formulate the GSL precisely. But it is also harder to claim that a bounce happened. The reason is that now spacetime geometry fluctuates, and saying a "a bounce happened" requires a well-defined notion of time ordering

You can think of the theorem as saying that the Generalized Second Law implies a singularity and thus is incompatible with bounces and baby universes forming inside a black hole. Both of these conflicting notions are completely well defined only in the limit of infinitely many matter fields

In a universe with many matter fields, the geometry does not fluctuate. Then we know what we mean by the Generalized Second Law of Thermodynamics, and we know what we mean by a Bounce (or cyclic) Cosmology. My recent theorem says you can't have both.

Singularities in Space-Time Prove Hard to Kill | Quanta Magazine Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists will need to go to the ends of space and time to find a fix.

Do singularities exist? I'd always thought they were purely mathematical artifacts, but recent work in mathematical physics work from @bousso.bsky.social and others hint otherwise (for sufficiently broad definitions of "singularities" and "exist").

www.quantamagazine.org/singularitie...

The hidden ways Trump, DOGE are shutting down parts of the U.S. government Limits on spending have incapacitated parts of agencies as varied as the National Park Service and the Pentagon.

Science in the US is being actively destroyed simply by deliberately doing nothing. This article does not mention DOE, NSF, etc but it’s the same story. Processing freeze means: grants appear on paper but disappear in real life