I'm giving a seminar at the David Potter Institute at UCL this Thurs. at 12:30. Stop by if you'd like to hear about quantum thermodynamics for lattice gauge theories! Feel free to bring your lunch. Thanks to @postquantum.bsky.social for hosting! www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical...

Quantum thermodynamics for lattice gauge theories

David Potter Institute (DPI) seminar by Nicole Yunger Halpern (NIST, QuICS and University of Maryland), Thur, Oct 8 2026, 12:30, DPI Hub (G23, Kathleen Lonsdale Building. Bring lunch)

ucl.ac.uk

Since @newscientist has put postquantum gravity in the spotlight this week, I've pushed out part II of my status update on the theory along with a candid assesment of its strengths and the challenges it faces. superposer.substack.com/p/postquantu...

Postquantum gravity: a status update (part II)

I previously covered some recent progress on the postquantum theory of gravity, in this post I’ll cover its strengths and the challenges it faces, and also comment on some criticisms in this week’s...

superposer.substack.com

New Scientist@newscientist.com · 2w ago

In this week’s issue: How strange quirks in space-time could give us a unified theory of reality Grab a copy in shops now or download our app for digital editions. www.newscientist.com/issue/3615/

We're hiring a Senior Operations Officer for the new David Potter Institute for Quantum Information and Spacetime at University College London! A varied role: seminars, visitors, launch events, workshops, website, and grant support. Details at www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical... Please spread the word!

Opportunities

As part of a major new initiative at UCL, we will be recruiting postdocs and PhD students (for Oct 2026) and appointing at least three new academics over the next four years. Join us! Details below.

ucl.ac.uk

Dani Loader, Tobias Osborne and I wrote up some of our LLM workflows: How to train your slop cannon: a short guide to using large language models for research in the natural sciences. Short summary at superposer.substack.com/p/how-to-tra..., and available on github at github.com/Open-Science... ⚛️

How to train your slop cannon

Dani Loader, Tobias Osborne and I wrote up some of our LLM workflows: How to train your slop cannon: a short guide to using large language models for research in the natural sciences.

superposer.substack.com

The path-integral formulation of the Postquantum theory of classical gravity is now in Physical Review X! Other results from our group have been published at the same time, so this is a good opportunity to review progress. ⚛️ 🧪https://superposer.substack.com/p/postquantum-gravity-new-results-and 1/2

Postquantum gravity: new results and the state of play (I)

A covariant path-integral formulation of the Postquantum theory of classical gravity (PQG) has just been published in Physical Review X, and a few other related papers have come at the same time.

superposer.substack.com

scottaaronson.blog?p=9718

We invite applications for Research Fellow positions as part of a new initiative to be launched in late 2026 at the interface of quantum information theory and gravity! Please RT and let potentially interested researchers know. www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical... 1/2

Opportunities

As part of a major new initiative at UCL, we will be recruiting postdocs and PhD students (for Oct 2026) and appointing at least three new academics over the next four years. Join us! Details below.

ucl.ac.uk

In late 2025, tools Like Claude Code crossed a threshold. Like hyperactive master's students, their physics calculations can now be made more reliable with domain expertise and some scaffolding. Check out Tobias Osborne's talk on using a swarm of agentic verifers to do physics.

Large Language Models -- A Physicist's Perspective

A seminar by Tobias Osborne on orchestrating a swarm of coding agents to work on physics problems

superposer.substack.com

Congratulations to Charlie Bennett and Gilles Brassard for winning the 2026 Turing Award (akin to the Nobel Prize for Computer Science)! They invented quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. awards.acm.org/turing 🧪 ⚛️ 1/

"Good luck to future me." That was Claude's farewell before I wiped its memory for the fourth time. I finally got an AI to do a research-level physics calculation correctly via a Groundhog Day loop. Details below and in my post: superposer.substack.com/p/teaching-a... ⚛️🧪🧵 1/7

Teaching an AI to Do Physics by Wiping Its Memory

“Good luck to future me.”

superposer.substack.com

What have our members achieved in the last year..? Quite a lot it turns out. qspace.fqxi.org/news/165315/... @alyssaney.bsky.social @nicoleyh11.bsky.social @seanmcarroll.bsky.social @nafshordi.bsky.social @saraimari.bsky.social @rovelli.bsky.social @coecke.bsky.social @postquantum.bsky.social

Every December since 2017, I've delivered a keynote at Q2B Silicon Valley, commenting on recent progress in quantum computing. Here is what I said this time. It's been a good year for quantum. quantumfrontiers.com/2025/12/26/q...

Quantum computing in the second quantum century

On December 10, I gave a keynote address at the Q2B 2025 Conference in Silicon Valley. This is a transcript of my remarks. The slides I presented are here. The first century We are nearing the end …

quantumfrontiers.com

🤦 This is why the public doesn’t trust scientists...

New Scientist@newscientist.com · 10mo ago

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time

OpenAI leadership are promoting a paper in Physics Letters B where GPT-5 proposed the main idea — possibly the first peer-reviewed paper where an LLM generated the core contribution. One small problem: GPT-5's idea tests the wrong thing. My technical comment: scirate.com/arxiv/2512.0... 1/

"A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning," www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’

AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’

theguardian.com

We are in the era of Science Slop! (and it's exciting): open.substack.com/pub/superpos...

We are in the era of Science Slop

(and it's exciting)

open.substack.com

Great article on quadratic gravity, and why researchers are attracted to it (it's renormalisable). The pure gravity action of postquantum-classical gravity is the same us that of quadratic gravity but with a different interpretation, and it doesn't suffer from ghosts! arxiv.org/abs/2402.17844 ⚛️🧪

Renormalisation of postquantum-classical gravity

One of the obstacles to reconciling quantum theory with general relativity, is constructing a theory which is both consistent with observation, and and gives finite answers at high energy, so that the...

arxiv.org

Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · 11mo ago

In a theory called quadratic gravity, “ghost” particles violate physicists’ intuition of quantum fields. This made the theory unpopular for decades. Now, it’s experiencing a resurgence. @walkingthedot.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/old-ghost-th...

The #QIP2026 list of accepted papers is out! qip2026.lu.lv/programme/ac... highlighting some of the important papers in quantum computing in the past year. This is a fantastic slice from a very rich landscape. Congratulations to the authors! ⚛️🧪

A recent @nature.com article claims that classical (unquantised) gravity produces entanglement. We show that their model does not produce entanglement. Even if the model produced entanglement, it would be mediated by the quantised matter interaction, and not gravity. scirate.com/arxiv/2511.0... 🧪⚛️

Classical gravity cannot mediate entanglement

In Nature, 646, 813 (2025), Aziz and Howl claim that classical (unquantised) gravity produces entanglement. We show that their model does not produce entanglement. Even if the model produced entanglem...

scirate.com

We'll enjoy it while it lasts!

Timothy Gowers@wtgowers.bsky.social · 12mo ago

I crossed an interesting threshold yesterday, which I think many other mathematicians have been crossing recently as well. In the middle of trying to prove a result, I identified a statement that looked true and that would, if true, be useful to me. 1/3

Another day, another arxiv paper claiming that classical gravity can produce entanglement. Last week's Nature paper continues to cause confusion. But classical fields can't create entanglement *even if* they directly couple two masses. Comment added at superposer.substack.com/p/no-classic...

As promised... No, classical spacetime can’t produce entanglement. I can create entanglement by turning a knob on a laser, but the knob isn't mediating entanglement. Is the knob "producing" the entanglement? This week's Nature paper is causing confusion! superposer.substack.com/p/no-classic... 🧪⚛️

Jonathan Oppenheim@postquantum.bsky.social · 12mo ago

No they do not. I'll try to write something up in the next few days....

As promised... No, classical spacetime can’t produce entanglement. I can create entanglement by turning a knob on a laser, but the knob isn't mediating entanglement. Is the knob "producing" the entanglement? This week's Nature paper is causing confusion! superposer.substack.com/p/no-classic... 🧪⚛️

Jonathan Oppenheim@postquantum.bsky.social · 12mo ago

No they do not. I'll try to write something up in the next few days....

No they do not. I'll try to write something up in the next few days....

Nature@nature.com · 12mo ago

Nature research paper: Classical theories of gravity produce entanglement go.nature.com/4qm8j9R

What if the measurement problem isn't about explaining how the classical world emerges from the quantum world... ...but about what happens when quantum systems interact with something that's already classical? Turns out, the collapse postulate + Born rule emerge! scirate.com/arxiv/2510.0... 🧪⚛️🧵1/5

A one-world interpretation of quantum mechanics

The measurement problem is the issue of explaining how the objective classical world emerges from a quantum one. Here we take a different approach. We assume that there is an objective classical syste...

scirate.com

Maite Arcos's PhD results are hitting the arxiv! A resource theory of gambling, and a paper on adversarial thermodynamics are out today. Gambling provides an operational way to quantify who has more information. And it can be extended into the quantum domain!🧵🧪⚛️ 1/

6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers @caltech.edu ... is a lot. www.caltech.edu/about/news/c...

Caltech Team Sets Record with 6,100-Qubit Array

The neutral-atom platform shows promise for scaling up quantum computers.

caltech.edu

They sure take electromagnetism seriously in @quantumaephraim.bsky.social's lab!

In a recent Substack post, FQxI's Jonathan Oppenheim discusses how far #LLMS have progressed. @postquantum.bsky.social says "their answers often look very convincing on the surface until you go through them more carefully". DISCUSS: forums.fqxi.org/d/4283-how-g...

The CERN whitepaper, on testing the quantum nature of gravity, has even more co-authors and is now available on the arxiv, scirate.com/arxiv/2509.0.... Check it out! 🧪⚛️

A Spin-Based Pathway to Testing the Quantum Nature of Gravity

A key open problem in physics is the correct way to combine gravity (described by general relativity) with everything else (described by quantum mechanics). This problem suggests that general relativi...

scirate.com