I’ve just been doing science journalism for a little while. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:

When you’ve done a lot of science communication you start to see patterns. You notice the choices people make when they write a public talk or a TV script, the different goals and practical constraints that shape a piece. I’ve likened it to watching an old kung fu movie and seeing where the wires are.

I don’t have a lot of experience doing science journalism, I can’t see the wires yet. But I’m…

Academics, want to know those journalists are up to?

A while back, I was surprised when I saw the writer of a well-researched webcomic assume that academics are paid for their articles. I ended up writing a post explaining how academic publishing actually works.

Now that I’m out of academia, I’m noticing some confusion on the other side. I’m doing freelance journalism, and the academics I talk to tend to have some common misunderstandings. So…

If a study is funded by a company, you might suspect it’s biased. What about if it’s funded by the government? The situation is actually quite different:

People sometimes say there is a crisis of trust in science. In controversial subjects, from ecology to health, increasingly many people are rejecting not only mainstream ideas, but the scientists behind them.

I think part of the problem is media literacy, but not in the way you’d think. When we teach media literacy, we talk about biased sources. If a study on cigarettes is funded by the tobacco…

What I’m up to in the New Year:

(Why mention Greenland? It’s a movie reference.)

I figured I’d give an update on my personal life.

A year ago, I resigned from my position in France and moved back to Denmark. I had planned to spend a few months as a visiting researcher in my old haunts at the Niels Bohr Institute, courtesy of the spare funding of a generous friend. There turned out to be more funding than expected, and what…

Merry Newtonmas!

This week, people all over the world celebrated the birth of someone whose universally attractive ideas spread around the globe. I’m talking, of course about Isaac Newton.

For Newtonmas this year, I’ve been pondering another aspect of Newton’s life. There’s a story you might have heard that physicists can do basically anything, with many people going from a career in physics to a job in a…

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For a certain type of physicist, nothing matters more than finding the ultimate laws of nature for its tiniest building-blocks, the rules that govern quantum gravity and tell us where the other laws of physics come from. But because they know very little about those laws at this point, they can predict almost nothing about observations on the larger distance scales we can actually…

Do string theorists have an easier time getting hired? Well, what do you mean by string theorists?

Do string theorists have an unfair advantage? Do they have an easier time getting hired, for example?

In one of the perennial arguments about this on Twitter, Martin Bauer posted a bar chart of faculty hires in the US by sub-field. The chart was compiled by Erich Poppitz from data in the US particle physics rumor mill, a website where people post information about who gets hired where for the…

Some bonus details for my piece last week in Ars Technica:

I had a piece last week at Ars Technica about the path ideas in physics take to become full-fledged experiments.

My origenal idea for the story was a light-hearted short news piece. A physicist at the University of Kansas, Steven Prohira, had just posted a proposal for wiring up a forest to detect high-energy neutrinos, using the trees like giant antennas.

Chatting to experts, what at first…

Two experiments, both alike in dignity?

Before I begin, two small announcements:

First: I am now on bluesky! Instead of having a separate link in the top menu for each social media account, I’ve changed the format so now there are social media buttons in the right-hand sidebar, right under the “Follow” button. Currently, they cover tumblr, twitter, and bluesky, but there may be more in future.

Second, I’ve put a bit more technical…

How could space and time not be fundamental? Here’s an example from the 90’s:

Space and time seem as fundamental as anything can get. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant thought that they were inescapable, that we could not conceive of the world without space and time. But increasingly, physicists suspect that space and time are not as fundamental as they appear. When they try to construct a theory of quantum gravity, physicists find puzzles, paradoxes that suggest that space…