Fiona H. Panther
@FiPanther
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99% background, 1% astrophysical. @ForrestResearch Fellow at UWA in (astro)physics. Militant Bayesian with uninformative priors. Uncertainty is good, actually.
Perth, Western Australia
Joined September 2009
Delighted that my contributions to the department are truly being recognised, they’ve even erected this sign in my honour
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Tycho Brahe’s silver nose prosthesis, to replace the one he lost in a duel (with swords) about something physics-related. Way more metal (literally) than the stories of minor fisticuffs at a early 2010s neutron star conference I was regaled with by a postdoc a few years ago.
Tell me your favourite anecdote about the history of science/math.
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Jokes. I really need to get back into writing milquetoast bits on things we all widely agree about at some point.
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Sounds like a psyop to make us sit down and write more papers that we have to pay journals to publish. Not falling for this one.
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
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Easiest trolley problem ever, this one.
A bomb is about to go off that will kill scientific journals. You have a button that will save them, but if you press it one of your PhD students will fail their qualifying exam and master out. Do you?.
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I’m really taken with the idea that there are still some Tasmanian tigers out in the wild somewhere.
What's a conspiracy theory you believe with your whole heart?
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Managed to get through all of semester one without being accosted by Socialist Alternative, and then got buttonholed 3 times in a 5 minute period at lunchtime today on day 2 of semester 2. I’m going to take it as a sign to never attempt to trim my own fringe again.
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RT @ARC_OzGRav: GW231123: Heaviest black hole merger yet detected!.~100 M☉ + ~140 M☉ → ~225 M☉ remnant, spins near physical limit. “This bl….
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It’s actually a really fascinating game to play ‘why is lying in the middle of the footpath screaming the minimum energy solution to the current situation?’ using basic toddler logic and the facts that are available. It’s given me a whole lot of insight.
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One thing I was not prepared for with parenting a toddler is how eminently reasonable all their reactions are if you take into account the information available to them and how they think. It also gives me hope for humanity: maybe irrationality is just the result of a bad model.
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I have not opened new windows into the universe, but I may have cracked the exhaust vent a bit.
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On the other hand, it’s wildly freeing going into physics worrying that you never can come close to doing anything groundbreaking, and then discovering that it can be completely un-serious and you can just have fun learning cool stuff.
It must be hard, going into physics thinking you’re the next Einstein and discovering you’re the next nobody.
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If you’ve been at this longer than me, how often do they crop up? Once or twice a decade? It was interesting having a Weinstein-ultralite in my graduating class because I got to see it happen in real time. More knowledge doesn’t seem to be a prophylactic against it.
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I’m also not talking full viXra crackpots either, I’m people who have the actual ok-ish mathematical chops but a critical and fundamental misunderstanding in some key aspect of GR specifically, but enough chutzpah to convince idiots on the internet they’re legit.
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Curiosity question for the physicists: how often do you find you have students who get through to about masters level before leaving academia and go on to produce full-on GU-style ToEs that they insist on having taken seriously/they’re being suppressed by academic conventions?.
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Similar energy to the ‘magnets up the nose’ incident back during the heady days of COVID. I would wager that frosting your windows with petit Filous is way more insane.
“Dr Ben Roberts, a senior lecturer in healthy buildings at Loughborough University, said applying yoghurt to the outside of windows can lower the temperature by up to 3.5C.”. If it reaches 30c British people go fully insane
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RT @LocasaleLab: Academia runs on grant writing, not science. And the longer you stay, the more you forget there’s a difference.
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