Martin Bauer
@martinmbauer
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Working on particle physics, quantum sensors, dark matter. Associate Prof at @IPPP_Durham @durham_uni, FLF @UKRI_News, Science board member @STFC_Matters
Durham
Joined July 2021
In 35 picoseconds light travels ~1 cm in vacuum.
This tray is part of the CMS MIP Timing Detector (MTD), to be installed around the Tracker for the Hi-Lumi LHC upgrade. With ~35 ps time resolution, it will help CMS maintain event reconstruction accuracy even with 5x more collisions. đMTD Image of the Month.đ¸A. Benaglia
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The idea that you have to push against something to accelerate is one of the most common misconceptions.
How can Superman blowing air into a black hole create any push? A black hole is a voidâwhat would the air even push against?. #DumbWriting.
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Physics.
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In Germany, international students can study physics tuition-free because public universities are funded by taxpayers. Since universities receive the same funding regardless of nationality, they have no financial incentive to admit more or fewer international students, nor to use.
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RT @LKrauss1: In response to the War on Science we discuss in our new book coming out this month, the Trump administration has launched a wâŚ.
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I'd say: Go back, youâre missing something big there!.
@martinmbauer If a human came up with a way to predict orbits without needing the inverse square law, what would you say?.
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If Universities didnât take international students there would be *fewer* places for âsmart kids from Wisconsinâ. International students subsidise these places. This sounds like someone who hasnât ever thought about their position for longer than 3 seconds.
Marc Andreessen: if you're the parents of a smart kid where I grew up [rural Wisconsin] and you think you're going to get them into a top university in this country, you're fooling yourself. What level of untapped talent exists in this country that a combination of DEI and
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Cool paper!. It's interesting that it's limited to dimensionless variables. Does this suggest it performs better for physical systems that can be described by only dimensionless quantities?. I wouldn't be surprised if that is connected to the fact that it finds different sets of.
@martinmbauer Correction: "[the] Transformer is struggling to rediscover old physics". "Without any prior knowledge of the underlying physics, our algorithm discovers the intrinsic dimension of the observed dynamics and identifies candidate sets of state variables.".
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Absurd, ridiculous story, but if dumb emails are presented as the âWar on Science,â any scientist reading this will see it as completely out of touch with the reality of massive budget cuts gutting entire research programs.
From a Dean to his faculty at McGill U. Can it get much dumber? Sent to me by a faculty member there who was incredulous. The kind of nonsense pervades university administrations as we discuss in The War on Science, available July 29th.
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AI can't figure out the inverse square law looking at 10M solar systems, Newton figured it out looking at 1.
@martinmbauer 1OM for training dataset is too small.
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Instead of discovering new physics, AI is struggling to rediscover old physics.
Can an AI model predict perfectly and still have a terrible world model?. What would that even mean?. Our new ICML paper formalizes these questions. One result tells the story: A transformer trained on 10M solar systems nails planetary orbits. But it botches gravitational laws đ§ľ
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You know it's serious when physicists break out ALL CAPS in papers.
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RT @cosmicfibretion: No, your AI is not going to discover new physics. You have to go out and make precision measurements for that.
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RT @196884: Maiani: "soon we received a paper by. Lee and. Gaillard. but without. penguin. We were puzzled. I went to. London. where I sawâŚ.
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In order to have generational wealth you need to have wealth first
In Berlin, a friend told me about a map that was circulating of East and West Germany, illustrating how individual generational wealth was far greater in the Westâa supposed testament to capitalism's superiority. But as my friend pointed out, what the map left out was that in.
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Examples?.
Grok 4 is the first time, in my experience, that an AI has been able to solve difficult, real-world engineering questions where the answers cannot be found anywhere on the Internet or in books. And it will get much better.
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Can't really blame the detergent industry for stealing names when physicists looted the soap aisle first
A two pack of quantum dishwasher detergent. I presume it uses a quantum network to distribute entanglement between the packs?
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I would really like to know if there's anyone who seriously believes it's wise or sustainable for the entire UK university system to be so financially dependent on international student fees. And if nobody wants this system, why do we have it?.
Visa applications to study in UK slip for first time in 2025. There were fewer international student visa applications in June 2025 than in the same month in 2024, marking the first year-on-year fall in six months.
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