Daniel Whiteson
@DanielWhiteson
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Particle physics and ML (). Co-creator @DanielAndJorge podcast and @ElinorWonders TV. Patreon: .
Joined March 2014
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Pinned Tweet
New book announcement!
"Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe"
Questions, jokes, and a few answers!
Nov 2, 2021
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LOL, physicist is the only career listed as requiring ALL OF THE MATH.
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@docum3nt
@ConnorMEwing
This is why I regularly flip through the thesis section of the library when I’m short on cash.
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@isl3y
@jjs1951
@blackography
@rsrd_jsy
@DannyDutch
Dolphins: "Where can i score some blow....fish?"
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I will keep maxing out these nonsense categories until grad programs phase them out.
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I have a PhD in particle physics.
I use Google to look up the quark content of a proton. Every. Single. Time.
Why do we test kids on their no-googling science skills?
We are offering one section of online 9th Grade Physical Science this year and I was wondering how much students used google on their tests (even though they signed a very clear statement saying that they didn't google anything)
Can you find my Google traps? 😜
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I know an electron's position and momentum, exactly.
!⃝ 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗱
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Guess which astrophysicist.
Astrophysicist believes alien tech may 'have crashed into Pacific Ocean'
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Physics sh*tposting was invented by physics grad students to avoid doing their physics HW.
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@AstronomyMag
Astronomy Mag headline writers bungle science journalism, possibly undermining their credibility forever.
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When you wake up early to join a meeting in Europe, and realize you're an hour too early. 😴😴
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New favorite auto-miscorrect:
"Quantum Field Therapy"
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I'm only a physicist, but isn't "1 planet and 3 suns" a FOUR body problem?
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"Particles can't be created or destroyed"
-- Justice league, which I'm watching on a TV that creates photons.
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Time to see what this quarter's batch of students already know heading into my "advanced particle physics data analysis lab" class
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Want a quick understanding of special relativity?
IMO, this is the *best* set of notes:
They use cute cartoony space-time diagrams to give you a quick understanding.
For example: time dilation explained!
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“I’m 35 and ended up in a boring job but love physics. Can I still become a physics professor?”
I get this question a LOT, and the answer is YES, but there are some things to know. A thread 🧵:
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Thank you to Reviewer 4, who wrote:
"There is little to say, except that this is an exceptional proposal. Fund fund fund."
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I’m a physicist who likes talking to philosophers.
These are hard questions and smart people have been thinking about them for centuries.
If you're wondering why physicists don't like talking to philosophers, it’s because conversations like these do nothing to advance the field.
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Purrrrfect black hole
My cat successfully demonstrating the curved universe theory 😂
@DanielWhiteson
@johannamvos
#Caturday
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Physics grad students: Come work with me!
We are hiring a post-doc to work on the ATLAS experiment, starting ASAP. A mix of hardware and physics, primarily stationed at CERN at first.
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@NashCitySmitty
@MarlowesLeftEye
@davidfrum
"I then asked him [Putin] a second time in a totally different way [about election meddling]" Wow, Trump the master cross-examiner.
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The LHC is up and running again!
After much thought and pages of calculations, below is my definitive list of the particles I’m sure we will discover and why.
1/n
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Does this data prove (a) the Higgs boson exists (ie also before Higgs et all were born), or does it prove that (b) Higgs model describes data?
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@Hipstercrite
My wife and I met Leonard Cohen at a party. She asked him for real estate advice. His advice was "Diversity is overrated. Find your people and live with them."
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Embarrassed to admit I had no scientific papers published in elementary school.
Would legit never get accepted into middle school by today’s standards.
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The replies here are so painful.
So many misunderstandings of what the big bang is and isn't.
What’s a scientific theory that sounds like bullshit to you?
One for me is the big bang theory
There was something smaller than a piece of sand then it blew up and became everything
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Are physicists in short supply?
i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that.
let's get that movie made!
(i think the social network managed to do this for startup founders.)
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It’s not complicated:
we should give more people more money to do more science.
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Glad to see everyone taking this stuff seriously. 🤪
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Where's the Community Notes on this nonsense?
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A lot of confidence out there that anti-matter doesn’t fall up.
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Just watched "Roxanne" (1987).
Totally holds up...*except* this line:
"The top and bottom quarks are the most common"
Top quark wasn't even DISCOVERED until 1995....
Is it too much to ask rom-coms to get the particle physics right?!
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Check out my new...
COSMIC MICROWAVE ZOOM BACKGROUND
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Daughter: my friends think you’re weird.
Me: Why?
D: you talk like a scientist
Me: what does that mean, exactly?
D: Yes. Just like that.
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There are now more physics sh*tposting accounts than sci-comm accounts.
There are more grains of sand on Earth than there are atoms in the entire visible Universe! 🔭🌌🛰
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Nada. Zip. Zilch.
Research is exploration. There are no guarantees, only amazing surprises laying in wait. Or nothing.
Only way to find out is to go look.
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Physicists: philosophers should stay out of physics
Also physicists: I haven’t read anything but philosophy is trivial so here goes...
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About to interview Noam Chomsky about communicating with aliens. What should I ask him?
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Huge congratulations to
@KatrineWhiteson
, who just got tenure at UCI!
She's done what many find challenging on its own, while having two kids, following my career to CA and Europe (10x across the Atlantic w/toddlers), and putting up with me.
Congrats to the REAL Whiteson Lab!
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If you heard that it’s impossible to do science AND sci-comm, here’s a brave soul pushing the envelope and wildly succeeding.
🚨 Some news from me! 🚨
I am ABSOLUTELY THRILLED to announce that, as of June 1, 2022, I will be joining the
@Perimeter
Institute for Theoretical Physics as the inaugural
Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication
(auto-CCs at YouTube link)
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What should you do to prepare yourself for success in grad school?
Take advanced math classes? Do more research? Follow
@FinitePhysicist
? Argue with
@WKCosmo
? Learn to make posters in PPT?
Maybe. But IMO a vastly underrated skill is:
WRITING.
Thread...
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I’m doing a project on elderly particles. If you are a Higgs bosons older than 0.00000000000000000001s, please DM me.
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If a grad student has published several papers, should they ALSO have to weave them together into a thesis?
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Headline: exciting new scientific image!
Image: baloney fabrication in place of the real image.
Why are we still doing this?
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Theory twitter yesterday: thought experiments are not experiments, duh.
Theory twitter today: this anti-matter experiment wasn't necessary. We knew what the outcome would be.
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Another of my PHD students snapped up by industry.
Does that mean I’m training them well...
...or driving them away from academia?
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@punished_cait
@jonrosenberg
The closer they tailgate, the slower I have to drive to stay safe.
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Nothing physics has learned about the Universe is likely to be fundamental.
It’s more likely that everything we have studied are emergent phenomena.
Using Physics as your template for how science works makes you stupid about science. Physics is a weird little science with a very simplistic causal structure. It’s fundamental laws are universal. They operate always and everywhere. No other science is like that.
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Been teaching for 15 years, never had this happen before.
Walked into class and found a zipped pouch at the lectern.
Peeked inside to find...
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Physicists: is it up squark, sup quark, or sup squark?
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2020 Year-In-Review thread.
For my day job:
Wrote 7 physics + ML papers
For my side-hustles:
Dropped 105 podcast episodes
Launched a TV show about curiosity
Submitted a manuscript for a pop-sci physics book
Just for fun:
Completed 10 bake-show tech challenges
Thread ⬇️
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Tur(lt)ing machine.
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Concluding (b) is scientific. Concluding (a) is philosophical.
Lots of physicists make strong philosophical claims while also dismissing philosophy as silly.
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Do these look like appropriate parent-child interactions to you?
The Higgs INTERACTS WITH ITSELF!
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@boseaglex3
@clapifyoulikeme
@EAustin1969
@yesica
@ChristianCooper
It's rural privilege. Otherwise, shouldn't other minorities get similar protection in EC?
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@korodgers
New presentation title: “On extemporaneous speaking under duress: a real-time experiment”
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Today's inbox.
If you like what someone is doing, take 5s to send them a note. Otherwise, they have no idea!
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A rant: why don't we fund more science?? It's the best investment anyone ever made in anything.
Read this story, about how 30 years of dedicated science will recover a fairly normal life for thousands of CF sufferers:
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I pretend to be a physicist, almost every day!
Why are there so many fake accounts pretending to be physicists on Twitter ? Who pretends to be a physicist of all things??
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Research is exploration of the unknown. Nobody should require, expect or make guarantees about discoveries.
Particle physics has a problem. While astronomers know that a bigger telescope will find interesting stuff, even if it just involves getting spectra of things we have only been able to image before, there is no guarantee that a bigger particle accelerator will find *anything*.
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Me: you know your friend X’s parents are also scientists
D: What really? They just talk like parents.
Me: ??
D: They don’t talk with a “quantum theory podcast voice”
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New paper!
Measuring how well a smartphone camera can detect cosmic muons!
Led by Jeff Swaney and Mike Mulhearn, with
@cshimmin
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New paper!
Mapping Machine-Learned Physics into a Human-Readable Space ( )
Led by Taylor Faucett, with Jesse Thaler
This paper asks: can we translate a black-box NN into human language?
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Is it "Blue States Don't Matter" or "All Lives Matter"? Trying to keep up.
Praising his own virus response as deaths near 200,000, Trump says, "if you take the blue states out, we're at a level I don't think anybody in the world would be at."
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This collider cost me $10B.
This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.
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IKEA name should be: SÜPËRPöSITIØN
I’m sure you particle physicists would love this thing I found in ikea today
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