Shalma Wegsman

Fingers crossed. Keep telling your members of Congress this is important.

My last story with Quanta dove deeeeep into quantum crystals. You can’t read about research this fresh anywhere else! 🧪

BREAKING: The United States of America

Nazi Germany did literally ban Nature:

"Articles are often published in the London weekly scientific journal Nature containing outrageous and vile attacks on German science and the national socialist state.

The journal must therefore be excluded from general use in the scientific libraries."

I am no fan of Springer, but to preempt objections that this is hyperbolic language, the Nazis literally banned the same journals and justified the decision using very similar rhetoric.

The National Science Foundation is getting kicked out of their building

First images from the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory are out!

Rubin sees an area on the sky of about 9.6 square degrees with a 3.2 Gigapixel resolution. This is like taking a picture of a football field from a mile away and still being able to resolve the thickness of a dime on the field.

⚛️🧪

Well this is fucking crazy

New paper: "Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective" (D. Krakauer, J. Krakauer, M. Mitchell).

We look at claims of "emergent capabilities" & "emergent intelligence" in LLMs from the perspective of what emergence means in complexity science.

arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135

The civilian wing of the MAGA movement is attempting to murder Democrats and their spouses in their homes.

The state wing of the MAGA movement is arresting Democrats for performing their official duties.

The MAGA movement is trying to make it illegal to oppose Trump.

Brad Lander, NYC comptroller and mayoral candidate, is arrested outside immigration court New York City comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander has been arrested at a federal building in Manhattan as he was trying to accompany a person out of an immigration courtroom.

what is it called when people who aren't cops and don't have a warrant drag you away, because I don't think "arrest" is the word

Wired continuing to do great + important work for the political moment!

So much waste and harm could be avoided if we just treated these as fragile, dangerous tools suited for very specialized use cases, like we do with lasers and circular saws, and not as magic thinking beans

Do large language models have a legal duty to tell the truth? | Royal Society Open Science Careless speech is a new type of harm created by large language models (LLM) that poses cumulative, long-term risks to science, education and shared social truth in democratic societies. LLMs produce ...

This is very thorough and very good. Among other things, it reiterates that the fact LLMs only "tell the truth" sometimes (but bullshit with utter confidence) is a feature, not a bug. It can't be simply fixed post hoc.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

I'm reading Meghan O'Gieblyn's "God, Human, Animal, Machine" and now I can't stop seeing its argument everywhere: that the whole idea of the technological singularity is the newest iteration in a long history of religious prophecies — a metaphor taken literally.

I would love to think that everyone has known for a long time that LLMs aren't going to lead to "general intelligence," but all the evidence suggests there are plenty of people who resist this, so it's good to have a paper from researchers Apple making the point strongly.

Mark is such a talented and passionate science illustrator it was a pleasure to work together on this!

For my latest story at @quantamagazine.bsky.social I dug into cutting edge research that’s using geometry to understand the bizarre quantum behaviors of materials. Huge shoutout to @markabelan.bsky.social for bringing the abstract ideas to life with 3D graphics!

This is tickling the part of my brain that got me excited to work on video game physics in the past—cognitive science taking inspiration from computer graphics!

In light of this deeply illegal activity at NSF and the ongoing attack on American science, I'm posting the slides from my 2017 talk at the American Physical Society about the Nazi take over of German physics/why German is no longer science's lingua franca 🧪

🧵 1/26
drive.google.com/file/d/1_MCm...

Nima Arkani-Hamed, the theoretical physicist, presents a slide that says “Two cheers for shut up and calculate”

Sean Carroll, the physicist and philosopher, presents a slide titled “Two cheers for noisy philosophizing”

Enjoying the diversity of opinion at the Natural Philosophy Symposium, ft. @seanmcarroll.bsky.social and Nima Arkani-Hamed

Restoring Gold Standard Science By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 7301 of title 5, United

This EO is a lot of words for a rule that basically says, political appointees will overrule scientists in deciding what the government considers factual information.

How Noether’s Theorem Revolutionized Physics | Quanta Magazine Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights continue to shape physics.

The conceptual consequences of Noether’s theorem are hard to overstate.

As a physics journalist, it is fairly wild to see the names of the PIs with terminated grants: Misha Lukin, Philip Kim, Lisa Randall, Subir Sachdev, John Doyle...
bsky.app/profile/benn...

Thanks Ben! very excited to read your piece next week!

Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences | Quanta Magazine The physicist Sidney Nagel delights in solving mysteries of the universe that are hiding in plain sight.

“My deep and abiding feeling is that if you look at anything closely enough, there will be new riches to be found.” — Sidney Nagel, physicist at the University of Chicago

I guess thinking is counterculture now

Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging."

Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.

I wrote about my decision in TIME.

time.com/7285045/resi...

Just a few days after Columbia announces the Pulitzers, the university goes and suspends its own student journalists.

"Celgene had kept the price of Thalomid low when it was initially intended for AIDS patients...as the company “didn’t want huge numbers of people demonstrating in front” of its office.

That wasn’t a problem with cancer patients. There was “plenty of room for very substantial increases”..."