Indeed, classical physics is even harder!
11.02.2026 07:31
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Indeed, classical physics is even harder!
Headlines fade, but the wavefunction flows on! Happy that the book "Why Nobody Understands Quantum" is available in the US as of today.
www.panmacmillan.com/authors/fran...
Although 2025 was absolutely shocking in terms of the cruelty of powerful people, science can still be a refuge from it. A highlight for me was retreating to the mountains to teach at the Les Houches Summer School. Here are my lecture notes: arxiv.org/abs/2512.24390
One of my favourite tensor-network diagrams keeps on giving (from arxiv.org/abs/2511.04674 ):
Perfect Particle Transmission through Duality Defects arxiv.org/abs/2510.26780 : manifestations on the lattice of one of the most intriguing results in conformal field theory.
Philip Anderson, more than any other physicist, helped pivot theoretical physics away from reductionism toward emergence as a guiding principle. Yet almost no popular-science books explore this crucial shift—an exception is www.panmacmillan.com/authors/fran... . An excerpt:
What if all the laws that we know are just effective laws, valid at certain length scales? Isn't that emergence? And does that not mean that reductionism is impossible, as we will never be able to know the real laws that lie at the origin of this flow?
From a friend of my bikig club: "Clearly, Martinis would have gotten nowhere without the help of Clarke"
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded for macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling, is a perfect example of emergent phenomena in action. It’s also one of the key reasons we wrote our book www.panmacmillan.com/authors/fran...
— because no other popular science book talks about this.
Gauging versus dualities: equivalent up to constant depth quantum circuits. arxiv.org/abs/2509.22051
The simpler the physics, the more non-simple the math: new insights into the structure of MPO symmetries arxiv.org/abs/2509.03600
Ground states in (topological) phases of quantum spin chains have unique dual descriptions in terms of much less entangled completely symmetry broken ones: a synergy of fusion category and physics. rdcu.be/eAVWm
Was fun to record a podcast for @intelligence2.bsky.social with the wonderful host Shini Somara on our book "Why nobody understands quantum physics": scientists and writers, unite! open.spotify.com/episode/6sBG...
Finally, a book that does justice to the hidden heroes of #quantum physics: Landau, Anderson, Wilson i.e., cond. mat. physics community. Symmetry breaking & renormalization, concepts which unite #physics. It includes key papers from many-body physics (see timeline). Looking forward to reading it!!
The book launch took place at the magnificent Royal Institution (@ri-science.bsky.social), the cradle of science popularization.
Happy to see our book "Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics" published in English www.panmacmillan.com/authors/fran.... Unlike other popular science books, we explain quantum and its applications in the way working physicists use and understand them, without shying away from the many-body problem.
