Robert McNees Profile picture
Professor, physicist. Black holes, quantum gravity, cosmology. Tennessean. Rocky Top. Tar Heel. RTs are spooky action at a distance. Views mine, not employer's.
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Aug 12, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
For all his scientific accomplishments, Schrödinger was a sexual predator who wrote in his journal about infatuations with girls as young as 12. He groomed a 14 year, and abandoned another girl he impregnated. He argued that he had a right to do this, because of his genius.
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Saying "He was also a complex and controversial person who had unconventional views" is a weak cop out. When he was 53 he set his sights on a *12 year old*. The girl's family had to have a priest intervene.
Aug 11, 2023 15 tweets 3 min read
Gather round, friends, and let me tell you an equally horrifying story.

Back in the 2000s I was renting a little kit house in south Austin. It was my last year of grad school. My rent wouldn’t even get you a closet there anymore, but that’s not the terrifying part. (1/n) So I get my wisdom teeth removed. Only had two! But it still messed me up pretty good. They sent me home with some heavy duty codeine.

I settle into bed to sleep it off. The TV is on, and I’m pretty loopy from the painkillers. That’s when I hear a little noise.

*clink*

(2/n)
Jul 18, 2023 10 tweets 3 min read
Let me explain one reason why this is a potentially serious problem.

First, you should know that when I search google from an incognito window it gives me the right answer: just shy of 14 billion years, the current scientific consensus among cosmologists and astronomers. This means Google is using tracking info – what it thinks it knows about me – to decide which answer it should serve to a question *where there is clear scientific consensus on the answer*.

You can see the problem here.
Mar 23, 2023 34 tweets 11 min read
Mathematician Emmy Noether was born #OTD in 1882. She made groundbreaking advances in abstract algebra, and her eponymous theorems articulated the deep connection between symmetries and conserved quantities in physics.

Image: Public domain, photographer unknown Black and white portrait of... Emmy Noether began university at a time when women studying mathematics were only allowed to sit in on lectures. Even then, the professor’s permission was required.
Jan 19, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
A comic strip titled "Be Scientific with Ol' Doc Dabble" appeared in the Los Angeles Times #OTD in 1934, quoting the predictions by Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade of neutron stars, supernova, and the origin of cosmic rays.
Image: Associated Press, @latimes Zwicky and Baade submitted their papers "On Super-Novae" and "Cosmic Rays from Super-Novae" in March of that year. The papers weren't published until May, so this comic strip was published beat the papers to print by a full four months.
Jan 19, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read
Entertainer, childhood literacy advocate, and scientific philanthropist Dolly Parton was born #OTD IN 1946. Mostly known for her singing and songwriting, her Imagination Library program has distributed over 100 million free books to kids around the world.
dollyparton.com/imagination-li… And Dolly's contributions to Vanderbilt University Medical Center's research efforts in the early days of the pandemic helped support the development of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine.
cnn.com/2020/11/18/ent…
Jan 18, 2022 10 tweets 2 min read
Physicist Yoichiro Nambu (南部 陽一郎) was born #OTD in 1921. He developed a theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking to explain superconductivity, paving the way for electroweak symmetry breaking via the Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model.
Image: AIP Emilio Segre Archives A black and white photo of Yoichiro Namby. He is visible fro Nambu gave a lovely explanation of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Folks in a crowd might be looking in all different directions with no direction preferred. Occasionally, one person's choice propagates through the crowd. Soon everyone is looking in the same direction. That's SSB.
Jan 18, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
It’s short for Stemothy. Look, none of you have to agree, but this answer is very funny to me.
Jan 17, 2022 16 tweets 4 min read
Edwin Hubble submitted his paper "A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae" #OTD in 1929. It showed that "extra-galactic nebulae" were moving away from us with a velocity that increased linearly with distance.
Image: Carnegie Observatories Edwin Hubble seated at Mt. ... Hubble built on earlier work by Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Vesto Slipher, and used data that he collected with Milton Humason. You can read the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, here:
pnas.org/content/15/3/1…
Jan 16, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Albert Einstein presented a remarkable paper by Karl Schwarzschild to the Prussian Academy #OTD in 1916. It gave the exact form, according to general relativity, of the gravitational field outside a static, spherically symmetric mass.
archive.org/details/sitzun… Image This was the first analytic solution (besides the obvious one: Minkowski spacetime) of Einstein's notoriously difficult field equations. Einstein was delighted! He had assumed that the complexity of his equations would limit physicists to approximate and perturbative solutions.
Jan 4, 2022 24 tweets 7 min read
Physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton was born #OTD in 1643. He revolutionized our understanding of mathematics, mechanics, gravity, and optics, then foiled counterfeiters as warden of the Royal Mint.
Portrait: Barrington Bramley, after Godfrey Kneller Newton's "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” was published in 1687. It lays out his three Laws of Motion, which explain the relationship between the forces and changes in an object’s motion, and his universal law of gravitation. The cover page of the first edition of Newton’s “Philoso
Jan 3, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
It’s the second day of the new year and I’m settling in with an Old Fashioned and my dog to watch this documentary about the origins of Dungeons & Dragons.
secretsofblackmoor.com Absolutely love these mid 1970s - early 1980s nerds. Inject this stuff right into my veins.
Jan 1, 2022 13 tweets 4 min read
Ninety seven years ago, #OTD in 1925, Edwin Hubble announced that our Milky Way was just one of many lonely little islands of stars sprinkled throughout the Universe. Andromeda and all the other “spiral nebulae” were in fact separate galaxies, outside the Milky Way. Hubble’s announcement — other galaxies exist! — was made on the third day of the 33rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in a paper read by H.N. Russell. The meeting started on December 30th; I don’t know if Hubble waited for New Year’s Day to be dramatic.
Dec 31, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
So my mom, the world’s fastest knitter, just sent me a great and much-needed hat! And it comes with a neat story. Image The yarn is “Kumlien’s Gull” by @quinceandco. Image
Dec 31, 2021 13 tweets 3 min read
Some threads I did this year that I liked: Vera Rubin
Dec 30, 2021 13 tweets 5 min read
Yvonne Madelaine Brill was born #OTD in 1924. She was a rocket scientist who invented the hydrazine resistojet, which increased the payload capacity of satellites by reducing the weight of propellant they require. JWST (@NASAWebb) uses hydrazine thrusters!
Photo: W. McNamee/Getty Image Here is the JWST propulsion page describing its SCAT and MRE-1 thrusters which use hydrazine as a fuel and propellant, respectively.
jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-observato…
Dec 22, 2021 19 tweets 0 min read
Dec 21, 2021 24 tweets 7 min read
Mathematical physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette, who made foundational contributions to the study of Feynman functional integrals, organized the first American conference on general relativity, and founded the Les Houches Summer School, was born #OTD in 1922.
Images: UT-Austin Cécile Morette grew up in Normandy, studying math and physics at the University of Caen. Her graduate work, on quantum mechanics, took place at the University of Paris. Much of her education took place during the German occupation of WWII.
Dec 20, 2021 31 tweets 6 min read
Physicist David Bohm, who developed a non-local formulation of quantum mechanics that he hoped would evade some of the conceptually thorny aspects of the Copenhagen Interpretation, and would later inspire the work of John Bell, was born #OTD in 1917. David Bohm, in his early 20... Bohm’s quantum mechanics textbook was published in 1951. It was very successful, and is still available from Dover as an inexpensive reprint. Here’s my copy: The Dover edition of "...
Dec 14, 2021 19 tweets 6 min read
Happy #Quantum Day!

Max Planck presented work on blackbody radiation to the German Physical Society #OTD in 1900. His novel “quantum hypothesis” suggested that matter emits and absorbs light with frequency f only in discrete chunks of energy E=hf.
Image: AIP Planck’s quantum hypothesis would revolutionize physics, but he initially thought it wasn’t real. He suspected that the interaction of matter and radiation was tremendously complicated but still governed by the physics known at the time — what we now call “classical physics.”
Dec 14, 2021 8 tweets 2 min read
Yes, we know, that’s one of the reasons hospitals in your part of Michigan are on the verge of collapsing under a fourth wave.
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Ugh, the dripping condescension in that piece.