Author: Matthew R. Francis
-
Gaining time for brain cancer patients with mathematics
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While the article contains equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you…
-
When physicists go bad
My latest comic with Maki Naro addresses the instances where certain physicists abandon scientific ethics to promote dubious causes: eugenics, climate change denial, and so forth. Since this issue is a bit fraught, I’ve included notes and references at the end of this post. Journalism, y’know? [ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most…
-
Why falsifiability is a false guide to what is and isn’t science
I had a liberal arts education, which means that I mostly use what I learned to post nonsense on Twitter. However, thanks to my advisor, I got a solid grounding in the philosophy of science. While I’m certainly no philosopher myself, I also (hopefully) have a less simplistic view of how science works and doesn’t…
-
Seeing the unseeable: humanity’s first image of a black hole
Yesterday, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the first image of a black hole humanity has ever seen. That simple-looking image represents a century of scientific work: from the first theoretical calculations describing black holes; to the earliest hints that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its heart; to the technological advances…
-
You won’t be traveling by quantum teleportation
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This article appeared in the spring print issue of Popular Science, but has also been published online. Quantum teleportation is real, but it’s not what you think A commute…
-
Asteroids, Mars, and a vision for space beyond colonialism
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Who owns an asteroid? Celestial bodies like Bennu could help us tell Earth’s origin story. Or they could be strip-mined for resources Discussions around space travel are saturated in…
-
The mathematics of knowledge networks in the brain
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional…
-
Squeezing light to detect more gravitational waves
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This article appeared in the fall print issue of Popular Science, but I missed that this article had also been published online. Something called ‘squeezed light’ is about to…
-
The secret to good digital animation is physics
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This article is a little different from the fare you’re used to getting from me: it’s for SIAM News, which is the magazine for members of the Society for…
-
The weird new physics of neutrinos
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Already beyond the Standard Model We already know neutrinos break the mold of the Standard Model. The question is: By how much? For Symmetry Magazine: Tested and verified with…
Bowler Hat Science 