Jacopo Bertolotti
Associated Professor of Physics at the University of Exeter.
Scientific visualizations (grouped under the hastag #PhysicsFactlet).
He/lui/on. All opinions are my own fault.
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiMany people have wondered why the Chien-Shiung Wu never won the Nobel Prize for Physics. New findings from the Nobel archives, exclusively revealed in Physics World, show she was nominated 23 times by 18 different physicists - and yet was still left empty-handed. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/twenty-thr...
- Reposted by Jacopo Bertolotti[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiOOOOH Researchfish Is going extinct 🐡🐟🐠 help.researchfish.com/en_US/resear...
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiScientist types as #DnD classes: Fighter: The best way to approach any problem is to do an experiment first and ask questions later (assuming there is any question left to ask). Very high volume of fire, but needs a constant stream of money to pay for fancier and fancier equipment. 1/
- These are the days I am happy to live high up the hill.
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiThe Waterfront a bit closer to the water front than usual.
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiSpaceX's Starlink dodged 300,000 collisions in 2025. That's nearly 40 maneuvers per satellite, and it's rising fast – possibly hitting 1 million maneuvers in 2027. "If they make a mistake, we’re in really big trouble.” Story by me in @newscientist.com www.newscientist.com/article/2512...
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiHelp us make hope normal again. Join the Green Party now.
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiIt's weird I was REPEATEDLY told that payment processors "had" to ban all nsfw to mitigate the risk of processing CSAM. So if that's true then why wasn't X immediately dumped by every one of those payment processors when Grok turned into an automated CSAM generator?
- My long trip to Glasgow begins with me getting soaking wet on my way to train station. ☔️ How can you not love the British weather?
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiThis seems like a maliciously put headline to make people feel a certain way. Wikipedia is not partaking in generative AI. They are making AI companies and scrappers having to pay for training their modules off wikipedia texts. And having an AI (not that ai) tasked with updating dead links.
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiA U.S. president cannot be held accountable. Therefore, a U.S. president must never make a policy decision.
- tl;dr: Meta jumps from one unprofitable bubble to another unprofitable bubble.
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiWe've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiUrsula K. Le Guin, spitting truth.
- Students sometimes fail to appreciate that relativity did not emerge fully formed from Einstein's head. I for sure failed to appreciate how long before Einstein's 1915 general relativity paper people were already discussing the idea that mass might distort space-time. ⚛️🧪🎢
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiThere is always an XKCD
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiAnd 🥁 the final program of the *"Image Science" Gordon Research Conference*, to take place in Italy April 26-May 1st, is out! Please take some time to check the program, apply, *share* with your colleagues. www.grc.org/image-scienc... (1/N)
- Quantum mechanics is a wave theory, and once you look at it as a wave theory 99% of its weirdness completely disappears. (The "wavefunction collapse" is the only part that is not about waves, and also the only part that is genuinely weird.)
- Paper accepted! 🥳 "Explaining and exploiting the radial memory effect in multimode optical fibres" (A slightly older version is on ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2508.11389 ) 1/3 💡 ⚛️ 🧪 #OpticalFibers
- When (coherent) light propagates in a multimode fibre, each mode accumulates a slightly different phase, so the output looks like a random speckle patter. But it is NOT random! This non-randomness has a number of consequences. 2/3
- We show that a focused input will always result in a ring of excess intensity at the same radius of the input, we give a simple but rigorous explanation of why this happens, and suggest how this might be useful in practice. 3/3
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiNominations are now open for the Trust’s Philip Leverhulme Prizes, which are awarded in six broad subject areas and worth £100,000 each for two to three years. Deadline: Wednesday 14 May 2026, 4pm. 🔗 For more details, visit: www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-lever...
- Reposted by Jacopo BertolottiI took to the blog and wrote about the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, in case you're in the mood for a discount @seanmcarroll.bsky.social kind of thing: chadorzel.substack.com/p/why-the-ev...
