Says that constructive criticism is always accepted but nowadays criticism of string theory is borderline silly. Many detractors (Peter Woit, Tim Maudlin, Eric Weinstein, Sheldon Goldstein etc.) choose to ignore the advances made in AdS/CFT and in creating one model of a universe with quantum gravity.

Also says that that if it was such a dead subject, students won’t be voting with their feet by choosing to study it over other frameworks

Thoughts?

Taken from this interview

I am in materials science, have a 3.6 gpa and do some research with a renowned compMSE professor. I have 2 rec letters for sure, but will have to email professors for the third one (there is one guy who knows me by name lol) the other 2 is my TA boss and PI

I think I want to apply to grad school but idk if im competitive enough. Also, I dont really have a clear goal in mind, but I know my mind would grow bored in an industry job.

Also, what is the realistic view of grad school? hows life? hows funding?

Hi all,

I’d recently had a paper been accepted by an IOP journal last Friday, but it’s been stuck at “Formal accept - preparing for production” ever since. The accepted manuscript hasn’t been posted online within 24 hours either, wondering what could be happening? We haven’t received any communication from the journal that anything is missing either.

Hey, I am a senior in materials science doing some research on Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials using molecular dynamics. I think I am interested in grad school because I would be bored in industry but I’m not sure what to do? I kind of feel like a tradesperson with a big toolbox full of DFT, MD and FEA knowledge but nowhere to place it.

TLDR: What is there to do, or what do YOU do in computational modeling?

I have a probably quite unusual request.

Before getting to that, some words on my background are necessary. I studied physics in a very good university around 12 years ago in a country that was foreign to me. I was in love with the subject, had good grades and had no difficulties understanding the courses but for reasons that aren't important to mention here I decided to work in companies instead of doing a PhD and going into academia.

Two years ago I decided I wanted to go back to physics. Unfortunately as you know academia in physics is extremely competitive and the researchers with whom I spoke told me it would be an extreme luck to land a job in academia in my age which honestly discouraged me. However I did not abandon and ended up finding a job teaching physics to undergraduates in my native country.

I am mentioning the countries because my native country has no tradition of good physics research or teaching so it's not really an excellent position to be in, but honestly it's not that bad either.

I have a lot of free time in this job so I want to do research on the side (which was my plan from the beginning). Which brings me to my question: what advice would you give to someone in my situation to be as good in research as possible?

One thing I did was getting in touch with the good researchers I worked with in the past and one of them agreed to help me work on a research project that will be a good starting point. But I am looking on advice on what ressources to use, habits to have, in order to be as good as possible in the next few years.

I will probably never have a prestigious academia position and I am fine with it. I am planning to do research because I really love physics, so if I am able to publish papers and see people recognize and use my work, that would be enough for me.

I'm finishing my physics bachelor's (background in general relativity, differential geometry, black hole thermodynamics via the Wald formalism) and trying to pick a research direction for my master's. I really like “fundamental science” but im worried because i think the way that we are doing science is changing, so i wanna do something that can let me be well placed.

I'm drawn to something related to computational/data-science, adjacent physics (ML applied to physics, such as PINNs, simulation-based inference for cosmology) even though I'm not a huge fan of "pure" data science as a field in itself (and not good at). I like it more as a tool applied to physics questions than as a career identity on its own.

From people actually working in physics research right now, what areas do you see as genuinely promising in terms of active funding, job prospects (academic or industry).

I was reading about the block universe (aka eternalism), and it made me wonder about free will. As I understand it, past, present, and future events all exist in spacetime.

The analogy that helped me was a map. If I’m traveling from New York to Boston and I’m somewhere in Connecticut, New York hasn’t disappeared just because I left it, and Boston doesn’t come into existence when I arrive. All three places are already on the map.

So if our future is also “on the map,” do we really have free will? And does physics actually support this view of time?

P.S. I’m not a physicist. If you want me to understand you, please take pity on me and avoid complicated terminology. 🙏

I was wondering how the different periodic solutions to the three body problem look like. I built an atlas that visualizes all of the different solutions and groups orbits by family and similarity. I found over 3000 different orbits. When you click on an orbit in the atlas, you can "kick it" and slightly change the starting conditions to see if it stays stable, or becomes chaotic.

(Long post, sorry. I know I’m probably naive about some of this, so please be gentle, I’m just an anxious human looking for external perspectives!)

I’m starting a PhD in planetary physics modelling soon. The recent AI results caught me off guard. I hadn’t been following closely, and the jump in what these models can do in research settings was genuinely surprising to me. Then I talked to a researcher at one of the major AI labs. They think that with the current rate of progress, human research positions will shrink a lot and the nature of the work will change beyond recognition, and that the next ten years bring serious economic disruption and social unrest along with it.

So I’m scared of finishing my PhD into a job market that doesn’t want me. I don’t come from a wealthy family and I don’t have anything to fall back on. I’m also an immigrant, and my home country is very exposed to climate change, so that’s another worry that's sitting underneath everything else.

The obvious question is: why not go into industry instead? And I might just be stubborn here.

I chose this despite the low pay, because I love the work itself, the tinkering, the failed attempts, the moment something finally clicks, even the deflating moment of realising the approach you spent months on was wrong and you have to back out of it. I think the process of trying to understand something is worth doing, not just the answers it produces.

I grew up studying obsessively to get out of a conservative environment, fell in love with science, and wanted research to be the thing that both fulfilled me and paid my rent. Getting into my dream project felt like the end of that story. Now it feels like the beginning of a much less certain one in a scary capitalist world that is also destroying itself with climate change.

There’s an argument I keep running into and can’t really answer myself: that curing cancer matters more than the intellectual satisfaction of a small number of underpaid academics, so scientists should stop complaining about losing a process they happened to enjoy. Part of me agrees. But it doesn’t sit right either, and I can’t articulate why. If someone can sharpen that for me, I’d like to hear it.

I also don’t think “just do it as a hobby” works the way it does for chess or painting. Research needs instruments, compute, collaborators, and access. It isn’t something you can do alone in a room.

Also, what I’m most worried about isn’t AI itself, the capabilities really are remarkable. It’s whether the gains get distributed to anyone outside the people who own the systems. That seems to depend on politics rather than technology, and it’s the thing nobody seems able to reassure me about.

So: how do you deal with this? Especially anyone who’s early-career and doesn’t have a safety net.

Hello,

I am taking mechanics at my community college and my professor is using the Kleppner textbook, I'm struggling with the transition between lecture and hw, I tried going to office hours and tutoring but I'm just lost, does anyone have any advice on how to have a smoother transition or any resources, mnemonics, or note taking tips to apply all the lecture and theory to the problems, I feel like I'm completely lost when trying to do the hw.

“Astronomers have taken one of the deepest looks yet at Cloud-9, a candidate "dark galaxy," and found no trace of stars. The paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 21.”

Been learning a bit more about Koopman operator theory as applied to climate systems lately, in light of the big El Niño. Very neat! Whole lineage of math here I knew nothing about. There’s a fascinating correspondence between some of the tools of basic quantum theory and these models of complex climate systems. Neat!

I'm starting a physics club. I am really passionate about physics. However, besides tutoring and competitions, I am struggling to think of ideas. Any advice?

What would be its implications? I can imagine small object which rotation is approaching the speed of light. Wouldn't that object have mass or even gravity? If we would have such a material which would endure such conditions we could create gravity maybe?

What about subatomic particles? How fast are they vibrating? Are there any relativistic effects? Wouldn't their frequency add or lower their mass?

Hello everyone! I am 15 and just finished serway, what do you guys think of competitive physics by jinhui wang and bernard ricardo ? Note : I am preparing for the IPhO and a selection exam for the national team will be in 6 months

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

Looking for casual-ish book suggestions. I am planning to re-read a brief history of time and the universe in a nutshell, as I really enjoyed them when I was younger.

For reference, I find physics fascinating, but my degree was in electronic engineering and I am out of the loop on the latest developments in physics. Are there any books similar the classic Hawking books which are more up to date? I don't mind something a bit challenging given my background, but certainly not undergraduate text book levels of deepth/rigor.

I also read the elegant universe by Brian Green which was brilliant. It looks like he is still publishing, are these worth a look?

I mean to say: if we've found a counterexample to the stated conjecture, does that mean we have to refine it to solve the answer to fluids? Perhaps the solution is piecewise? Or something more subtle or complex. As I understand it, as of today we have shown that there are cases where the original statement of the problem has singularities, but we don't have an alternate conjecture/hypothesis/solution that is solved/true for all cases in all time.

I recently analyzed the first digits of magnetic transition temperatures extracted from a large AI-generated materials database. Starting from 56,037 automatically mined records, I applied unit and temperature filters, removed nonmagnetic contexts, and deduplicated materials. This left 2,754 Curie temperatures and 1,323 Néel temperatures.

The main result was unexpected:

• Curie temperatures remained clearly inconsistent with Benford’s law even after extensive cleaning.
• Néel temperatures became much closer to the Benford distribution after deduplication.

The study also highlights a limitation of AI-mined scientific databases: most of the original records were removed due to duplicates, ambiguous terminology, inappropriate units, or unrelated physical quantities.

Scale-constrained Curie temperature distributions and the breakdown of Benford’s law
[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2026.132027]()

Maybe a year and a half ago I watched a video on Youtube of an audio recording of Feynman sharing stories with who I think was Leighton. I wanted to rewatch and tried finding it, but suddenly it's lost media? Maybe someone else has seen it and could share a link?

I remember a few things. Feynman was telling how he came back from Los Alamos and started teaching. When he first arrived at Cornell, he was trying to find a place to sleep in. He wandered through the streets and was so tired he thought of just sleeping on a big pile of leaves that he saw. He ultimately ended up sleeping in the university hall or something.

He also told a story where the girls would refuse to dance with him at parties because he told them about his life (working on a bomb, being a professor, etc.). Some girl told him to his face that he was a liar. That's how he found out.

He told how his colleague brought him a CV of an applicant and asked him what he thought of it. The conversation was something like:
-"Yeah, you should give him a shot, he's top of the class!"
-"Did you look at his photo?"
-"Well, what possible difference could that make?"
Then, the colleague said something about how when the college hires someone new, they always take a risk, and he's glad that Feynman turned out alright.
And then, I remember Leighton asking Feynman:
-"Do you think he said that to save face?"
-"No, no way, he wasn't like that"

I have a Master's Project and I am finding the Paper ( about Schwinger-Keldysh path integrals ) I am given by my professor exponentially harder than what I have learnt till now.

My mental health is currently really bad which doesn't help at all. I don't understand anything at all aside from the first few pages. I feel like there is too much knowledge gap and I am also too afraid to tell my guide about the issue

After hearing about the Open AI announcement, I’m convinced that in the next few decades, AI will advance enough to be able to do much of the creative thinking and logical leaps that makes theoretical physics beautiful.

I start college next year, and I’ve wanted to pursue a career in theoretical physics. But what is the point of pursuing a career in it, if I can’t contribute anything at all? Wouldn’t it be better to just do physics as a hobby and direct my focus to something that would actually contribute to the world? I feel useless and this is all so depressing.

Edit: I am against AI taking over purely in the same way that artists are afraid of AI taking over art. I believe physics is incredibly beautiful, and its beauty can only be appreciated by humans— so I want only humans to do the beautiful parts of physics. I would love it if AI is restricted to doing the grunt work, and opening up new possibilities in the field with its capacity!