Sam Homiller

An interesting result out today from LZ. Definitely not a standard wimp, but maybe an inelastic scattering or momentum dependent scattering? (1/n) www.sciencenews.org/article/dark...

Now just think of the magical things that would happen if we built a muon collider

New: DOE is reorganizing the Office of Science, per email. Notably, it appears to be combining high energy physics and nuclear physics. Unclear if this keeps the funding pools separate. (I'll ask) Apologies for the low-res image; that's what they sent. On the right is the current org chart.

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across. If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers. If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

Shonny Miller, whoever you are, please for the love of god, stop trying to use my email address. It is not yours. It has never been yours. I am not interested in your Sam's Club statements or your pest inspection reports.

Playing Guess Who (animal edition) with the toddler: 3yo: I’m going to choose the duck. Mom: You’re not supposed to say that out loud 3yo: *whispering* I’m going to choose the duck. .. Grandma: Is your animal green? 3yo: No, it’s white. It’s the duck.

Apologies to the copy editors employed by APS who have to add "boson" after "Higgs" about 60 times in our paper for no reason other than the Physical Review being silly

European particle physics strategy update summary 😅

Computer Modern ftw

Sad to see C.N. Yang passed away, a legendary physicist who despite his achievements was also one of the most underrated physicists of the 20th century and could have won multiple Nobel prizes not just one. He put Stony Brook University on the map and left an indelible impact on the YITP ⚛️🧪

If you see this post a bridge. (Roberto Clemente Bridge, Pittsburgh)

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Can confirm lol.

Important:

Awful news: CMB-S4 is cancelled. This experiment was massively exciting for the cosmology community. It would have told us about the state of the universe some 400,000 years after the big bang, at a level of precision we can now only dream about ⚛️🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

The president's budget proposal cuts billions in funding from the DOE Office of Science, NIST, NASA, and the NSF — but there’s still time to change it. Tell your lawmakers why they should stand up for science using our letter-writing toolkit, targeted to your state: go.aps.org/3RP9EWF

It continues to astound me just how much everything can be so awful and so unserious at the same time

atmospheric signatures of life: the “Majorana quasiparticles” of planetary astronomy

Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, orders that all recipients be notified of the TRO within 24 hours and that a compliance report be filed with the report within 48 hours. TRO: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Colored Feynman diagrams from MadGraph? Is this their April Fools' Day celebration this year?

Belle-II weighs in on the RD/RD* anomaly? 👀 (indico.in2p3.fr/event/35965/...)

Hard to overstate how disruptive this will be for a generation of particle physicists, specifically

Ashoke Sen with a response to III: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07883 But missed the opportunity to title it “New Ideas for Old Physicists”

Not sure how I should feel about this page being linked from the calendar with my seminar later this week 😅 physics.illinois.edu/calendar/sem... (But @mrocek.bsky.social might appreciate it)

At the risk of Tom thinking I have it out for him, Section 1 being "Introduction" and Section 2 being "Conclusions" I think is a paper format we can all aspire to arxiv.org/abs/2502.01367

We have enough institutions collapsing this month without the dictionary posting this nonsense…

Irrationally upset by the number formatting being different in each of these papers: arxiv.org/abs/2208.08959 arxiv.org/abs/2307.15812 arxiv.org/abs/2501.17697

My resolution this year is to spend a little bit of time each day thinking about the Roman Empire

Mathematical physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette was born #OTD in 1922. She made foundational contributions to Feynman functional integrals, organized the first American conference on general relativity (important for gravitational waves), and started the Les Houches Summer School. 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬 (1/n)

Just got a citation request before even seeing that the paper was on the arXiv 🤣

Surely some kind of record: Yesterday we re-submitted a paper to address some questions from the referee. They got it, responded, and it was accepted, all in under 3 hours! I’m happy, but now also a bit ashamed at the usual turnaround time for reports I write…

Every timeout Kirby calls has me more convinced he’s actually Ted Cruz

Thankful for the apparent meta-stability of the Higgs vacuum today 🙏 (figure from arxiv.org/abs/1707.08124)

👀

I expect I know the answer, but still find it remarkable that so many institutions insist on using Interfolio when it's so incredibly bad at the really simple task it's built for and surely costs much, much more than most of the alternatives...

Why doesn’t CERN have a mascot?

Going to start waking up every morning scared that Jim Cline is going to eviscerate my work out of nowhere from now on...

I have a lot of misgivings about all my work being on Overleaf nowadays, but for starters, why is every remotely mathematical/scientific word excluded from its dictionary??

A bit late, but Dan Garisto had a nice story last month in MIT Tech Review about the current state and future of particle physics at the energy frontier. I was quoted a few times, mostly for my enthusiasm following last year's P5 report: www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/20/1...