Dan Garisto

Chicago’s beloved ‘rat hole’ was actually made by a squirrel 14 Oct 2025 Ancient chewing gum could reveal how early men and women split up their chores 14 Oct 2025 Whiplash at CDC as hundreds of employees are terminated, then reinstated 13 Oct 2025 DNA from rum-soaked fishes chronicles century of environmental change 13 Oct 2025 Economics Nobel celebrates researchers who showed how science and technology drive growth 10 Oct 2025 As U.S. shutdown drags on, ‘it’s just one blow after another’

A real rollercoaster reading @science.org headlines right now.

With six very talented colleagues: @jennaahart.bsky.social, @maxkozlov.bsky.social, @heidiledford.bsky.social, @alexwitze.bsky.social, Jeff Tollefson, and Traci Watson.

Scientists lose jobs and grants as US government shutdown takes a toll Hundreds of people at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received layoff notices, and work at many federal laboratories has been suspended.

Not common to see a 7-byline story in the wild, but that's what the situation calls for when the government shuts down and every science agency needs to be checked in on for RIFs, grant terminations, and general dysfunction.

Our update on what the chaos means for science here:

I hate to say it, but this is an actual business strategy, with a... deliverable. AGI-powered cancer cures are not.

I think the concerning and distressing thing is that this formulation might empirically prove better than other versions of prompts.

Not too far-fetched to imagine a future where people are chiding their self-driving cars to be careful and avoid accidents.

silver cluster grapefruits, painted by royal charles steadman, 1916

silver cluster grapefruits, painted by royal charles steadman, 1916

RIFs may be quite bad at CDC, it seems

What kind of sabermetric stat are we looking at here. WAR? TS%?

A reasonable question: to what extent is this about the appearance of RIFs (cf. AI grim reaper videos, 'put feds in trauma') than actually reducing the number of federal employees via RIF, given the legality?

With the exception of HHS, these are not particularly large RIFs for science agencies, compared to previous attempts to reduce staff.

NOAA (within Commerce) has already lost about 1,500 FTEs since the beginning of the year, per the shutdown contingency plan.

Agency termination details from lawsuit. Numbers are same as in above screenshot of tweet: Commerce: 315 employees - Education: 466 employees - Energy: 187 employees - HHS: Between 1,100 and 1,200 employees - HUD: 442 employees - DHS: 176 employees - Treasury: 1,446 employees - EPA: 20-30 employees

Ah, okay—details seem to be from sworn OMB declaration for AFGE lawsuit. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

NEW details on impacts of the layoffs that took place today: - Commerce: 315 employees - Education: 466 employees - Energy: 187 employees - HHS: Between 1,100 and 1,200 employees - HUD: 442 employees - DHS: 176 employees - Treasury: 1,446 employees - EPA: 20-30 employees

Have not confirmed, but here are specific numbers...

It does not seem like OMB/DOE know who exactly they want to try and cut. Nor are they prepared to do so. They certainly are making a lot of noise about it though.

DOE source says it "feels very saber-rattley at the moment, everyone including leadership seemed confused."

Confirmation & details about RIFs at DOE, per agency source:

Federal employees working in renewable energy offices (solar, wind, and hydrogen fuel cell) received a 'general' notice of possible RIF at a meeting this afternoon. If identified individually, DOE employees will be sent specific RIFs.

An injunction would have no additional, “meaningful practical effect” here, where an order declaring unlawful and vacating the Policy would fully resolve the parties’ dispute and prevent injury to Plaintiffs. See NSF, 2025 WL 1725857, at *23 (“Enjoining Defendants from implementing or enforcing a policy that has been vacated would be duplicative.”). Accordingly, the Court will not issue a permanent injunction at this time.

Murphy does not issue a permanent injunction against DoD citing SCOTUS rulings on the APA as guidance, and the lack of need on top of vacatur.

Note closely: 'at this time'

This case is about “indirect costs,” an accounting term undoubtedly unfamiliar to most. Defense Secretary Hegseth has seized on this knowledge gap to call them “waste” and “bureaucratic fat.”3 But that is entirely misleading. Indirect costs are the buildings within which new materials for life-saving armor are developed. They are the supercomputers that find new ways to defend our country against cyber-attacks. Yes, they are also the assistants who keep things running and the custodians who come in at night. But these are not “waste.” Indeed, the regulations treat them as both “necessary and reasonable.”4 Admittedly, research grant funding is not the most riveting topic to come before this Court. However, the Court has come to appreciate that, as Defendants readily admit, basic research is an “essential” service that universities provide to the federal government and so to the American people. In exchange, universities submit themselves to a baroque and exacting regulatory system that scrutinizes their costs and demands accountability. Yet, Defendants would unravel that partnership with less than a nod toward Congress’s requirement that federal agencies make reasonable choices and rationally explain them.

"Admittedly, research grant funding is not the most riveting topic to come before this Court. However, the Court has come to appreciate that, as Defendants readily admit, basic research is an 'essential' service that universities provide to the federal government and so to the American people."

Memorandum & Order – #90 in Association of American Universities v. Department of Defense (D. Mass., 1:25-cv-11740) – CourtListener.com Memorandum & Order

New: Judge Murphy vacates DoD's 15% indirect cost plan, adding to court losses for DOE, NSF, and NIH.

www.courtlistener.com/docket/70552...

A brief summary of everything I have written on RIFs to date. RIFs are insanely complex and procedurally difficult to implement. Most RIFs are challenged on procedural grounds. 1/7

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/a-pr...

These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission – work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law. The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone. In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education. As you know, MIT’s record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America’s research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.

A measured but firm 'No' from MIT against the Trump administration's compact.
orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Fueled by this frenzy of research activity, quantum computing has garnered massive and ever-increasing amounts of publicity and funding as companies and countries try to capitalize on the technology. Overstated claims are rampant, in many cases verging into baseless hyperbole. Quantum computers are not, in fact, going to solve climate change. So it came as something of a surprise when the Nobel Committee for Physics avoided almost all mention of quantum computing during its announcement of this year’s physics prize. In the announcement’s official scientific background information, the topic received only two mentions. The committee’s careful message discipline paid off, and news headlines focused more on the fundamental physics and less on the buzzy application. For many physicists, the absence of hype was a relief and the downplay of quantum computing a reasonable choice. “You can fully justify the importance of this experiment without those practical implications,” Girvin says. After all, “we don’t yet know how practical quantum computing is actually going to be.”

Anyways, my quibbles with framing aside, I want to note what has _not_ been the star of the show, thanks mainly to some very diligent message discipline by the Nobel Committee.

What Clarke, Devoret and Martinis showed is that even macroscopic reality can be blurred if it is shielded from direct contact with the wider environment. By isolating their electrons from noise and staying at ultralow temperatures, they were able to bring the foggy indeterminacy of quantum mechanics into a circuit one could hold in the palm of a hand. “It’s quantum mechanics all the way up,” Girvin says.

What Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis showed with macroscopic quantum tunneling, is that a macroscopic amount of electrons does indeed behave like Schrödinger's paradoxical puss (here, the states are 'zero voltage' and 'some voltage', instead of 'alive' and 'dead').

When Schrödinger proposed his thought experiment in 1935, he had meant it as a critique of the seemingly paradoxical conclusions quantum mechanics implied about the classical world. Unlike a particle in superposition, a cat could not actually be blurred between being “dead” and “alive.” Any confusion about the cat’s state could be addressed by a direct measurement. “That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a ‘blurred model’ for representing reality,” Schrödinger wrote at the time, according to a translation by physicist John D. Trimmer. “There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”

Schrödinger—at least when he proposed the thought experiment—would have said no. Cats don't exist as a linear combination between 'dead' and 'alive' and neither should 10^17 electrons. (A cat, for the record, is about 10^26 electrons.)

This is really the heart of it: If you have a huge number of electrons, will they really maintain a superposition?

Do macroscopic degrees of freedom obey quantum mechanics? During the first six decades of quantum mechanics the answer to this question was never addressed experimentally. Quantum mechanics was known to survive at the macroscopic level only through collective phenomena such as superfluidity, superconductivity, flux quantization and the Josephson effect. Although these phenomena are conventionally described as ‘macroscopic’, they are in fact classical manifestations on a macroscopic scale of the combination of large numbers of microscopic variables, each governed by quantum mechanics. The faceting of certain crystals, such as quartz, revealing the covalent bonds between constituent atoms, represents an elementary example of this class of quantum phenomena exhibited on a macroscopic scale. In 1980, Anthony Leggett1 emphasized the importance of distinguishing macroscopic quantum phenomena originating in the somewhat trivial large-scale accumulation of effects originating at the level of microscopic variables from those displayed, hypothetically, by a single macroscopic, collective degree of freedom. Although nothing in theory would seem to prevent such variables from fully obeying quantum mechanics, we felt challenged to see if it really was the case in practice.

The laureates reiterated this in 2020. The goal wasn't to observe tunneling, or to see a macroscopic quantum phenomena, but to see a 'macroscopic degree of freedom' with quantum properties—that is, the cat's paradoxical superposition of dead & alive.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

However, there is a much more subtle and interesting sense in which the question can be interpreted. To motivate this interpretation it is necessary to recall one of the most famous paradoxes in the foundations of quantum mechanics, the so-called Schrodinger's Cat paradox. I shall review the line of argument which leads to the paradox in the next section; for present purposes it is sufficient to recall that it essentially consists in the conclusion that a macroscopic object (in the original version, a cat) may be in a linear superposition of states corresponding to macroscopically different behaviour, provided only that it is not "observed". Once an observation or "measurement" is made, however, the system immediately collapses into a state with definite macroscopic properties. Now whatever one's reaction to the paradox, it is clear (cf. next section) that it only arises at all because one has implicitly assumed that the linear laws of quantum mechanics, in particular the superposition principle, apply to the description of any physical system, even when it is of macroscopic dimensions and complexity. The question then arises whether there is any experimental evidence for this assumption: In particular, is there actually any evidence that macroscopic systems can under appropriate conditions be in quantum states which are linear superpositions of states with different macroscopic properties? That is the question to which this paper is devoted. The plan of the paper is as follows. In the next section I briefly review the Schrodinger's Cat paradox, paying particular attention to the implicit assumptions involved in its formulation.

Intro to PRL: "The observation of macroscopic quantum tunneling is regarded as a test of whether quantum mechanics is valid for macroscopic variables, a fundamental question that has only recently been addressed experimentally."

One surprise for me: how explicitly the search was really tied to Schrödinger's thought experiment. Here's Leggett in 1980, and Clarke, Devoret, & Martinis citing him, front and center in their discovery paper:

Quantum Tunneling Is a Big Deal. This Year's Nobel Physics Prize Shows Why The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2025 honors scaled-up quantum physics—while sidestepping controversies swirling around quantum computing

Nobel coverage is fast-paced, and there's often not time to reflect on the accomplishment before the next one. (Congrats to the Chem laureates, by the way.)

My day two story on why Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis were looking for macroscopic quantum tunneling and how they managed the tricky search:

Devoret designed transmons; Martinis has done groundbreaking work with quantum computers.

The point is that Nobel Committee could easily have cited quantum computing for this prize. That they did not and kept it in the background is notable.

Suspect we'll see more of this, given the funding situation.

BBC headline: "Physics Nobel prize awarded to three quantum physicists"

hmm, not what I'm seeing on the website