Matt Reece

Have you made other lectures for this class publicly available? I’ll be teaching QFT 1 in the fall so I’m starting to look for sensible approaches that don’t follow a textbook.

To: Jeffrey Epsteinljeevacation@gmail.com] From: Christakis, Nicholas Sent: Thur 9/26/2013 1:56:03 AM Subject: Re: Thanks You are hilarious. My sense of humor. Yiddishe kop N Please excuse brevity and orthography and this fine print -- since this has been sent from my iPhone. Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD http://www.HumanNatureLab.net On Sep 25, 2013, at 9:40 PM, "Jeffrey Epstein" <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote: great first date On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 9:27 PM, Christakis, Nicholas < wrote: Dear Jeff I've been on the road and in meetings literally since leaving your house [sic] yesterday light and just got to DC. I greatly enjoyed the company and the setting (amazing of course) and the many good questions, especially yours. Josh was terrific; bu you already know that. Best regards, Nicholas Please excuse brevity and orthography and this fine print -- since this has been sent from my iPhone. Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD http://www.HumanNatureLab.net

From: Sent: Christakis, Nicholas Jeffrey Epstein Sun 9/8/2013 6:22:14 PM Subject: Re: meeting again no back until the 21, but lets definitely schedule after On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Christakis, Nicholas wrote: dear jeff: thanks for the kind words. i enjoyed meeting you; i had not known you were connected to john brockman, but i should have guessed! as luck would have it, i am slated to be in NYC this coming thursday for a dinner and could meet before that, any time between 2 and 5, if that happened to work for you. otherwise, i could surely come back again within the coming weeks. my lab has a number of foci at present: 1) the evolutionary biology and genetics of social networks and social interaction; 2) the experimental exploration, using online tools, of network structure and function in humans (how does network structure affect phenomena like cooperation, innovation, health, etc.); and 3) randomized controlled trials in the developing world of network 'targeting algorithms' aimed at enhancing spillover effects, so as to facilitate population-level behavior change by identifying and targeting influential people. let me share three papers with you (one unpublished) that flesh out some of our work (specifically [1] and [2] above): best, nicholas On Sep 8, 2013, at 3:41 AM 9/8/13, Jeffrey

From: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com> To: "Christakis, Nicholas" = Subject: Re: introduction -- follow-up Date: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 12:26:20 +0000 great I will be back in sept. lets try then On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 6:12 AM, Christakis, Nicholas < nicholas.christakis@yale.edu> wrote: Dear Jeff: The editor wrote the provocative title, but this NYT Op-Ed from last week captures some of my thoughts about how the social sciences are evolving, and must evolve, given developments in the natural sciences. I thought I would share it: I don't want to swamp you with links because I know you are terribly busy, but if you want more nuance than 800 words allows, 1 make the argument at greater length here (in the first 8 minutes): http://www.edge.org/conversation/a-21st-century-change-to-social-science Also, as I mentioned in the piece, various labs, including my own, have continued to spearhead the move to use Amazon Mechanical Turk workers as a pool of research subjects in diverse projects; for example, here is a recent PNAS paper that shows how the topology of interactions between members of a group can be affirmatively manipulated to elicit desirable properties (such as cooperation): http://humannaturelab.net/wp= content/themes/human-nature-lab/media/pdf/publications/articles/126.pdf We have also been developing ways that AMT workers can be used as a ready pool of subjects for real-time pedagogic purposes, with novel software (as alluded to in the piece). I'd still welcome the chance to meet with you (and Linda?) to discuss some of our ideas, if you have the time and interest, and I can easily come into NYC since I have now moved to New Haven.

I guess the best-available defense to this sort of thing—lots of friendly emails and visits with someone recently convicted of procuring a child for the purposes of prostitution, I mean—is something like “He seemed to have lots of money and connections and I would have liked a little piece of that”

All the examples I’ve found fall in the category you might call “shocking but not surprising.”

No one told me working at Harvard would mean getting to read all the private emails between my colleagues and the world’s most famous pedophile.

There's no ICE accountability without ending qualified immunity.

They're murdering people. There won't be justice for the lives they've stolen, but there must be accountability.

My bill with @markey.senate.gov would ensure families can sue the agents murdering their loved ones.

Screenshot of post reading: These are not rogue agents. This is an all out assault on American life. ICE is a criminal organization that is entering homes without judicial warrants, detaining witnesses, and killing people. All at the direction of Trump. We must stop funding DHS. There is no other path forward. Responding to post reading: The Tribune also says ICE has transported several witnesses into detention.

We must stop funding DHS.

To be fair, several years before ChatGPT, I read an application from someone who wanted to work with "Leonardo Schwartz," a cosmologist who doesn't exist. So some students can hallucinate on their own.

You look at what Spanberger gets done in one day and it becomes even more depressing that Massachusetts gets stuck with a dud governor like Maura Healey

Your colleague Sarah Shandera is one of the people who may have thought about this more recently.

Black hole formation in the context of dissipative dark matter Black holes with masses of $\rm 10^6-10^9~M_{\odot}$ dwell in the centers of most galaxies, but their formation mechanisms are not well known. A subdominant dissipative component of dark matter with s...

It’s definitely possible that a percent or so of dark matter is made up of dissipative stuff distinct from ordinary CDM, which could form large black holes by direct collapse. I did estimates of this a decade ago but never wrote it up. arxiv.org/abs/1812.03104 looks similar but I haven’t read it.

Text: “A friend said those of us who live in Minneapolis should write about what's going on here for folks who live elsewhere. You need to know that whether you're a Republican, Independent or Democrat, the Constitution is being violated by our federal government. This is not about catching criminals, or even deporting people. It is about punishing an entire state, including citizens, for not supporting the president. Everyone in my part of Minneapolis is affected. On our streets, ICE is stopping people of color and demanding their papers. In America. US citizens do not have to prove citizenship to ICE. Yet people are being intimidated, some cases beaten up and detained, for requiring ICE to follow the law. ICE needs a judicial warrant to enter homes. Yet there are documented cases of them ignoring the law - violating a bedrock constitutional principle. Americans of color are staying home, afraid to go to work, school, to grocery shop, or fill their cars with gas. This isn't just "illegals" or immigrants with valid work permits, it is citizens who have had their cars rammed by ICE for merely looking Hispanic. Businesses are closing. Schools are 50 percent full. When they are open, fascists are calling in bomb threats because the president decided to make us a meme. After a daycare teacher with a valid work permit (through 2030) was snatched from her workplace, parents (and grandparents) have had to organize to watch their SCHOOLS, to make sure conditional rights are observed. This is being repeated throughout Minnesota. Imagine trying to do your job or live you life while also taking volunteer shifts to make sure the federal government doesn't act extrajudicially. Because of ICE's documented abuses, neighbors have organized to monitor federal actions. This observation is legal, as long as it doesn't interfere with a valid action. Yet since ICE killed Renee Good, they are increasingly stopping this observation, breaking car windows and …”

People not in Minnesota: please read this excellent summary of what life is like in Minneapolis since the murderous scum ICE swarmed here. And more are on their way. By local reporter / writer / bike dude / legend @dbrauer.net .

Reading another fine example of the Air Bud school of particle physics model-building, which rests not on physical principles (established or otherwise) but on "There's nothing in the rule book that says I can't..."

But do the agencies have the administrative capacity and will to issue the funds Congress allocates? NASA didn’t even put out a call for proposals for most areas it funds last year. Even with money from Congress, there are no grant proposals for them to select.

If we're doing "remake Boston to satisfy my personal preferences," my counterproposal is to cover all of I-90 between Herald St and Marginal Rd with a large park to make it more pleasant to walk between the South End and Chinatown.

New institute to strengthen fundamental physics research, collaboration— Harvard Gazette Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics made possible by $20 million gift from the Leinweber Foundation.

Some news: Harvard is the 8th institution to receive a gift for theoretical physics from the Leinweber Foundation. We're excited to have a new, stable source of support for PhD students and postdocs, at a time when young researchers have been especially anxious about careers in science in the US.

When we couldn't find the topics in the library, even at the university next door, he just mocked us. He told me "you'll never make it as a chemist." I was seriously demoralized by his teaching. Luckily I had other great science teachers so he failed to derail my interest completely.

Interesting to see Jeffrey Wigand's name in the discourse. To me, he was the 9th grade science teacher who took a class full of kids excited about science and did his best to make us hate it. Gave us challenging assignments with no explanation and refused to even point us to a book. 1/

European particle physics strategy update summary 😅

Computer Modern ftw

Love when we order delivery from a restaurant, our food never arrives, the restaurant tells us we have to ask the delivery service for a refund, and the delivery service tells us we have to ask the restaurant for a refund, so we accept the loss and cobble together a quick meal ourselves like chumps.

Three takeaways for Boston from NYC’s congestion pricing scheme - The Boston Globe After a year of the first American program of its kind, there’s enough data to recommend the idea.

Congestion pricing in NYC has worked and has become popular. Cities like Boston should follow.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/05/o...

Is Brookline daycare that cheap? We’re paying $2.2k/month in Boston for one kid, and that’s on the cheap end of places we looked into. Some were over $4k/month.

The Nobel Committee, seeking nominations: "We encourage you to take a wide perspective, including e.g. inventions and female candidates."

🤨

I learned from one of the Nero Wolfe books that perfect scrambled eggs take 45 minutes to make, and realized that I don't have the patience.

The trick is to buy the Amtrak tickets way in advance. Last minute, they can be ludicrously expensive, but ahead of time often cheaper than MBTA. It’s a bit weird that Amtrak takes much longer to go from Providence to Boston than the reverse, though.

"Let's just say I know the 6 bus very well."

Yes, there’s a difference between restoring terminated grants after court orders and issuing new ones. I had a grant up for renewal, recommended for funding in the spring, but then no further communication. I would guess that agencies have been ordered not to issue new grants to target schools.

The DOE's new "Genesis Mission"? Every time I see it mentioned I can't help but think "rich, Corinthian leather."

As I keep telling people, no, large gauge transformations aren't physical.

I was removed from them right around the time I started posting snarky comments about him on bsky. I kind of miss them, they had good entertainment value even if it was the gawking-at-a-train-wreck kind of entertainment.