Raphael Bousso

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...

Academic freedom is "do you want the next generation of medical doctors to be trained?" It is "do you want vaccines?" It is "do you want your kids to learn true things?"

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

YouTube video by World Science Festival Is Gravity the Hidden Key to Quantum Physics?

Brian Greene is a national treasure, a singular amalgam of grace, professionalism, and brilliance. Also, he's pretty good at explaining stuff
youtu.be/16kzFN0SWYg

What's happening with these grants is much more complicated and mostly unknown. None of the NIH have been officially cancelled. The NIH was just ordered to stop paying. They got the Unis to enforce silence on their own campuses because they thought they were "negotiating" and cld get the funds back.

My kingdom for a moderately okay government

Exclusive: NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy “I have done all I can,” says Sethuraman Panchanathan, a Trump appointee who has led agency since 2020

Panch resigns: www.science.org/content/arti...

Graph of NSF awards. Compares April 2024 to April 2025, which levels off.

In addition to the terminations of existing awards, new NSF grants are still stopped completely since DOGE was granted access to systems a week ago.

Last Thursday, an agency spokesperson said "NSF continues to issue awards." That does not appear to be the case.

Francis was not a friend of the rich and powerful. Even yesterday, after meeting with JD Vance, he cried out against his barbarism: "How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants."

Pope Francis was a friend of science. I am proud to have met him, and I am saddened by his death.

Senator Lisa Murkowski Makes Startling Admission as Trump Wages Retribution Campaign Lisa Murkowski, a longtime senator from Alaska and an independent voice in an increasingly tribal party, has been the rare Republican on Capitol Hill willing to criticize President Trump’s actions.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/u...

"I guess it really is a Big Tent" I yell over the sounds of breaking glass caused by David Brooks throwing a metal trash can through the window of a Starbucks to distract the police while Bill Kristol spray paints NO SYSTEM BUT THE ECOSYSTEM on a cop car

Honestly I'm glad they picked Harvard to try out this novel "we're mad" legal theory of revoking tax-exempt status, given its infinite resources, deep network of powerful alumni, and law school attended by 142 sitting federal judges.

Good luck! 🫡