Shiraz Butt

Theoretical physics

[Sabrina Halper @SabrinaHalper]

"I think half the co-founders of Anthropic were theoretical physicists. Jared Kaplan was exactly in the same area of physics as I was. Dario was in physics back in the day, also at Princeton, but he was more on the bio side. There's been an exodus of physicists to more interesting problems, and I think that's for a good reason"

Why @matanSF dropped out of his physics PhD at Princeton

[Shiraz Butt @shirazbutt]

@chris_juravich A side question - how are you making these beautiful math images?

[Shiraz Butt @shirazbutt]

@lepton939 @martinmbauer According to your intuition - what would not consider a representation/desceiption in the case of QCD? Or just generally?

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

A student submitted an essay she wrote by hand. Her university ran it through an AI detector. The detector said she cheated. She is autistic.

Her name is Moira Olmsted. Adelphi University. February 2026. Turnitin flagged her essay as 100% AI-generated. She was disciplined.

Two other AI detectors classified the same essay as human-written.

She sued. She won. The court called the school's decision "arbitrary and capricious."

She is not the only one.

In May 2026, a high school student in Palo Alto was expelled after an AI detector flagged his work. He faced visa revocation. He filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.

A researcher at Griffith University just proved mathematically why this keeps happening. The paper is on arXiv. The finding is one sentence.

AI text detectors have a structural flaw that no amount of better engineering can fix.

Here is what the math says.

If a university wants its detector to catch 80% of cheaters, at least 750 out of every 10,000 innocent students will be wrongly accused. That is not a software problem. It is a theorem.

If the university tries to limit false accusations to 1%, detection power collapses to 6%. It catches 6 out of every 100 AI-written papers. The other 94 get through.

There is no setting where the detector is both fair and effective.

The reason is diversity. Every student writes differently. Non-native English speakers use simpler vocabulary. Shorter sentences. Clearer structures. So does AI. A Stanford study found that 61.3% of TOEFL essays written by non-native English speakers were misclassified as AI-generated. A separate analysis tested 14 commercial detection tools. Zero out of 14 reached 80% accuracy.

The students most likely to be wrongly accused are non-native English speakers, neurodivergent students, and anyone who writes with clarity and precision. The qualities that make their writing effective are the same qualities the detector mistakes for a machine.

Vanderbilt University understood this. They disabled Turnitin's AI detection in 2023 after calculating that even a 1% error rate across 75,000 submissions would produce 750 wrongful accusations per year.

750 students accused of cheating for writing like themselves.

The paper's conclusion is not that we need better detectors. It is that the diversity of human writing itself makes accurate detection mathematically impossible.

The same thing that makes your writing yours is the thing that gets you accused.

https://t.co/L91ldtXP05

[Wolfram @WolframResearch]

You never know when you're going to run into a special function.
Download "Introduction to Special Functions" for free today!
https://t.co/6FBWqOxeuN

[∇ₖPascal ∇ₚKwanten (∛) (Πασκάλ) @pascalkwanten]

FeynGame-2.1 -- Feynman diagrams made easy https://t.co/rSPw7IfNXb

[Γ(z) @gammaofzeta]

According to the Julian calendar, today is Newton’s birthday (Newtonmas). So, I’ll talk (briefly) about one of my favorite parts of Newton’s Principia:

In his Principia (Book II, Section IX), Newton provides a hypothesis that serves as the foundational statement of what we call: Newton’s law of viscosity (for Newtonian fluids, i.e.: fluids where internal resistance -want of lubricity- doesn’t change with shear stress).

This law can be summarized as follows: the shear stress τ -which is the tangential (to the surface) component of a force acting on a fluid divided by the area, is proportional (linear relationship) to the rate of shear deformation (the velocity gradient du/dy, where y is a vertical distance), assuming constant conditions.

Thus, \tau = \mu \frac{du}{dy}, where \mu is the dynamic viscosity of the fluid.

Historical value: Newton used this hypothesis to debunk (propositions LI, LII) Descartes’ vortex theory for celestial motion.

Happy Newtonmas and happy Christmas to all my christian /catholic friends!🎄

[Shiraz Butt @shirazbutt]

@ashoswai Napolean did crown himself didnt he?

[Shiraz Butt @shirazbutt]

@MoeedNj Ai

[New Scientist @newscientist]

Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr had an ongoing rivalry about the true nature of quantum mechanics, and came up with a thought experiment that could settle the matter. Now, that experiment has finally been performed for real https://t.co/jVpnftCB0T

[Martin Henriksen - The Dane ✝️🇩🇰😎 @Henriksen_M_]

Påstand fra mit gamle parti Dansk Folkeparti: Remigration er ikke deportation.

Fakta: Remigration er deportation aka tvangshjemsendelser.

Det kan også være så meget andet. Men remigration er deportation af en række mennesker.

Hvis ikke, at det er det. Ja, så er det lige meget og vil ikke virke.

I øvrigt, så har Folketinget allerede vedtaget en hjemsendelsespolitik.

Det ved jeg, fordi den forhandlede undertegnede på plads i Herrens år 2018 sammen med Christian Langballe (må han hvile i fred ✝️🙏).

Vi forhandlede bl.a. med Løkke, Støjberg og en meget, meget lang række af jurister fra centraladministrationen. Det var ikke nemt. Der gik ret ofte konventionssnak i tingene.

Var aftalen og politikken perfekt? Nej, det var den ikke.

Men det var en start, de muliges kunst, og det var første gang !!

At gå fra integration til hjemsendelse er som at vende en supertanker.

Men de første parlamentariske skridt er taget. Der er slået hul.

Hvis nogen vil, altså oprigtigt vil, så er den bedste fremgangsmåde at rejse sagen på ny i nogle finanslovsforhandlinger, henvise til aftalen fra 2018, få tunet politikere og ikke mindst embedsværket ind på det, evaluere og udbyg herfra.

Det er den eneste vej frem i et parlamentarisk system.

Jeg nævner det, bare lige, i det tilfælde at nogle vil forstyrres af virkeligheden et ganske kort øjeblik.

God arbejdslyst 🫵🇩🇰✔️✈️

#reddanmark #danmarkforfolket

[Mr. Cardamom @MrCardamom]

You know I'll be forever spicy but I'm taking a break from being a spice to answer the question of what happens when a B-list rapper runs for office. Come through @ZohranKMamdani if you want answers.

[Shiraz Butt @shirazbutt]

@amgauge @PhysInHistory This is indeed true. According to Dirac, Schrödinger was highly inspired by the work of de Broglie. At first, his equation did not fit the experimental data, but that was because the spin of particles was missing — and no one knew that spin existed at the time.

[Keenan Crane @keenanisalive]

I got tired of mashing together tools to write long threads with 𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 and ℳα†ℏ—so I wrote La𝑇𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑡!

It converts Markdown and LaTeX to Unicode that can be used in “tweets”, and automatically splits long threads. Try it out!

https://t.co/BUsbHNCpnD

[Leo C. Stein is @duetosymmetry on bsky/threads/🐘 @duetosymmetry]

I'm sad to report that Rainer (Rai) Weiss passed away yesterday at age 92. Rai developed the design for LIGO, he and Kip got it funded, trained countless researchers, and received the 2017 Nobel Prize. Rai always had time for students and treated us as equals.

[Oliver Maclaren @omaclaren]

Teaching some matrix calculus at the moment, and mostly but not fully satisfied with my notes at the moment...found these, they look very good! Gives me some nice ideas to improve my own notes -- Matrix Calculus (for Machine Learning and Beyond) https://t.co/rtAlG2NqZ7

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

On the night of September 7-8, 2025, nearly 7 billion people — about 85% of the world population — will witness a total lunar eclipse coinciding with a SuperMoon.

[Richard Behiel @RBehiel]

Part 5 of the QCD series is now online! :)

In this final episode, we bring everything together to build the QCD Lagrangian and explore some related concepts.

Huge thanks to everyone who’s made it to the end. I hope it has been as fun to watch as it was to make!

https://t.co/ftQXBUfMrO

[Shiraz Butt @shirazbutt]

@nblqbl ماشاءالله congratulations with the newborn babygirl 💪🏽💎