Natalie Wolchover

📕Some personal news!📕 This will be my first book, an attempt to weave together the ideas and controversies of fundamental physics into a coherent narrative. Wish me luck!

@JosephPConlon @Samuel_Gregson Well, fingers crossed, eh?

@nattyover @Samuel_Gregson Well, to me I sit in a field (string pheno) which interlinks with astroparticle, early universe cosmology, axion physics, cosmic strings, plus mathematics of compactification, and then far away there are these formal people mostly talking to each other. Two maps of the world.

People are thinking — for the first time in decades — about whether string theory describes the world. Apparently. Really? Quanta needs to get out of its bubble and talk to more people.

@JosephPConlon @Samuel_Gregson Ha. You think the ~150-person field of string phenomenology is the continent and the rest of high-energy physics is the island?

@nattyover @Samuel_Gregson The use of `siloed' here reminds me of the famous (if apocryphal) English news headline: 'Fog in Channel. Continent cut off.'

@JosephPConlon @Samuel_Gregson Cheung also said the field is “siloed” on the issue (I didn’t directly quote that part of his statement but said it myself higher up). String phenomenology would be the silo. This bootstrap biz is new people and methods coming on the scene. True that they’re mostly in the USA.

@nattyover @Samuel_Gregson So this quote running unchallenged comes across to me as a perspective from one socialised among a small fraction of the US formal theory community. Because it may be taboo there, but it's certainly not taboo elsewhere.

@JosephPConlon @Samuel_Gregson Hmm. No one from those institutions is quoted in the piece. I’m curious what perspective you think I’m missing on this topic. (Less interested in the commentary of your interlocutors, who have pretty idiosyncratic views.)

@Samuel_Gregson In theory she seems to talk only to a very narrow set of theorists, pretty much IAS + Harvard + friends. It results in a skewed view of the field.

58 years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything.” This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. @nattyover reports: quantamagazine.org/are-strings-st…

Researchers have been “bootstrapping” stringy behavior for particles at high energies, showing that it uniquely follows from various assumed principles (not all of which we know to be true). My new column digs into that research and the overall status of string theory.

Do not miss this valuable piece about applied category theory. "#Math works well at describing simple, isolated systems, but as we go from atoms to organisms to ecosystems, concise mathematical models typically become less effective. The systems are just too complex." But, now there is the "green" math... #Science #Mathematics ⏯️Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place? quantamagazine.org/can-the-most-a…

Hidden on page 744 of the farm bill the House Agriculture Committee passed Thursday is a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates. Rebranded the 'Save Our Bacon Act,' it's a pork-industry play to wipe out every state law banning the sale of pork from crated pigs — laws the conservative Supreme Court upheld in 2023. Over 85% of Democrats and Republicans oppose these crates. Voters have backed ballot measures to ban them in state after state. The pork industry knows it can't win a straight vote on this. So it's burying the provision in an 800-page bill and hoping no one notices. Contact your senators and representative today and tell them: oppose the farm bill unless the Save Our Bacon Act is stripped out. You can reach them at senate.gov and house.gov — it takes two minutes and it matters.

Category theory is a mathematical way to formalize the relationships between objects. It could provide a powerful method for modeling complex, interconnected systems. Read @nattyover's new Qualia column: quantamagazine.org/can-the-most-a…

It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État trib.al/gAbdlNN

In 1874, Georg Cantor published one of the most important papers in math’s 4,000-year history. The ideas in it were stolen. 🧵

GPT-5.2 derived a new result in theoretical physics. We’re releasing the result in a preprint with researchers from @the_IAS, @VanderbiltU, @Cambridge_Uni, and @Harvard. It shows that a gluon interaction many physicists expected would not occur can arise under specific conditions. openai.com/index/new-resu…

Martin Hairer and colleagues released a set of hard maths problems, designed to be test cases for LLMs. We have *one week* to solve them, using LLMs. They encrypted the solutions at 1stproof.org and will reveal them just after. arxiv.org/pdf/2602.05192 (1/3)

Holding room for books coverage—fiction and nonfiction; bad, good, maybe great—clears ground for a culture that values ideas and ambitious art. It announces we're a real society in which it's worth trying to think and create new things; it's the basis of a fun, interesting world.

@TimHenke9 “Probably not” means “definitely not,” you say? OK thanks. Let’s just agree to disagree about the likelihood of maliciousness. I told you what Kaplan said; you can come to your own conclusions.

@nattyover with "lying, prob not" you make it very clear that him lying is not really a possibility worth taking into consideration. That is also what "no way" means. It doesn't mean "literally impossible", it means "not worth thinking about".

Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan had this to say about the future of physics research. A bold claim that I might not take as seriously if Kaplan wasn’t such a brilliant physicist before he left the field for AI:

@TimHenke9 I didn’t say “there’s no way.” You keep putting words in my mouth in order to be peeved by them.

@nattyover With all due respect, "there's no way this second-hand car salesman is lying, he seems so trustworthy" is naïvety unbecoming of a journalist

@Samuel_Gregson The position that new physics is needed to solve the many mysteries that the Standard Model doesn’t address isn’t one that I would dismissively attribute to “people like Hossenfelder.” It’s obvious. Anyway I mention that we’re still exploring the consequences of the SM.

@nattyover It doesn't unless you equate - as people like Hossenfelder do - progress with the fundamental overturning of the SM - a bizarre standard not applied to other fields. PP has been on an insane winning streak for a century. Now we're at: "but, what have you done for me lately?"

@Samuel_Gregson As explained, it wasn't the discovery of the Higgs but rather the lack of BSM physics. Re: the crisis framing, you might read section 3 of this great 2017 paper by Gian Guiduce: arxiv.org/pdf/1710.07663

@nattyover 5) The idea that particle physics entered an intense "crisis" when it discovered the Higgs Boson - the central and most important component of the SM, and a completely unique particle within that framework linked to dozens of open questions is a bizarre framing.

@TimHenke9 I meant what I said; I take the prediction a non-zero amount of seriously given what I know of Kaplan. I interviewed him when he was a theoretical physicist and found him insightful and honest, & he did some important work. Wrong, maybe, lying, prob not

@nattyover I will also humbly submit that if it was not your intention to say that you take this prediction seriously, you failed to communicate this to me and, I believe, many other people.

@TimHenke9 FWIW, I have the impression that he genuinely believes it. Who knows. He joked that there’s a Kool-Aid-drinking ceremony for new employees, that the physicist hires typically start out skeptical but come around to this view.

@nattyover That is a much more reasonable statement, yes. But again his professional qualifications don't affect his massive monetary incentive to lie or wildly exaggerate