Margaret Harris

@drmlharris.bsky.social

3407 Followers 1961 Following

Award-winning science journalist at Physics World magazine @physicsworld.bsky.social. Also available as @DrMLHarris@mastodon.social. All views on science, politics, history, nonsense, etc. my own.

Black and white photo of Bosnian officers in the Austrian-Hungarian Army during the First World War. They’re all wearing traditional fez caps.
Tweet from Elon Musk @elonmusk saying “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
A soldier in a mid-19th century scarlet red British uniform with gold braid and buttons. He has a pointy moustache, a little goatee and modest sideburns. He’s carrying a blue-and-white china teacup around a battlefield like the oblivious upper-class twit he is.
Photo of a big-screen TV showing Jeff Daniels as Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in the movie Gettysburg. The TV is above a mantelpiece and there are five red and green Christmas stockings hanging below it.
Post from Physics World dated 14 Nov 2024 (shortly after Trump's election) of a story in which Argonne National Laboratory battery scientist Venkat Srinivasan declares that "Batteries are largely bipartisan"
Photo of dinosaur footprints at Dinosaur Ridge, Colorado. There are big footprints made by a dinosaur with three wide toes and smaller ones with three narrow toes. They’ve been artificially coloured in darker grey to stand out from the light grey sedimentary rock that preserved them. There’s a small sign describing them.
Ramamoorthy Ramesh on a stage in front of a set of Earthshots symbolised by Olympic rings
Michelle Simmons in front of a slide showing photos of ever-smaller circuits
Preskill in front of a slide titled “Will AI eat quantum’s lunch?” and showing a photo of a half-eaten cheese sandwich
Preskill and a slide reading quantum machines for science
John Preskill standing on a conference stage in front of a slide reading "Frontiers of Physics" and containing information about the short distance, long distance and complexity frontiers. There's a sign-language interpreter visible off the stage to the right
Slide showing an image of the Earth with missile paths over the Pacific Ocean targeting the US
Slide showing a map of New York City with a target over its centre. A person standing next to the slide is speaking
Slide reading: Unsolicited advice from a middle-aged curmudgeon Appearance of impact • High-impact factor joumals • Journal covers ($$$) • Media coverage Social media promotion H-Index Department rankings • Inflated claims • "fancy person" lists Incentives, rewards directed here Meaningful impact • Change thought processes • develop new concepts • Elucidate mechanisms • Attack hard problems that matter • BS-check your own claims What do you ultimately want to accomplish?
A badge with the American Physical Society Global Physics Summit badge with the name Margaret Harris, the affiliation Physics World/IOP Publishing, and a qr code. Attached to the badge is a blue ribbon reading “Trouble Maker” that’s been crossed out and replaced with the word “Press”
Graveside plaque that reads: In Memory of SARAH JARVIS Who departed this life the 11th Day of December 1753 In the Hundred and Seventh Year of her Age Some Time before her Death She had Fresh Teeth
Grave memorial reading: In Memory of Sarah Jarvis, who departed this life the 11th Day of December 1753 in the Hundred and Seventh Year of her Age Some time before her Death She had Fresh Teeth
A blurry photo of wet green countryside seen through a train window
A black-and-white photo of Elma and Gustaf Dalen. He's wearing a three-piece suit with a watch chain, she's got a 1930s hat and a dress with a top that resembles a suit jacket and a string of pearls. He's also wearing dark glasses and not looking at the camera, and she holds his arm protectively while looking slightly sceptically at the camera.
A photo of Dalen's sunlight valve, which looks like a set of tubes in a glass case. This valve worked by means of a set of metal rods, one of which was blackened while the others were polished. When the blackened rod absorbed enough heat from the Sun, it would expand and close the valve. At dusk, or in foggy conditions, the blackened rod would return to the temperature of the others, contract, and open the valve.
Black-and-white photograph of Nils Gustaf Dalén as a young man. He's wearing an old-fashioned high-collared shirt and has a large, bushy moustache.
A lighthouse in Fécamp, France being hit by a wave on a windy day. It really doesn't look pleasant out there, although there's some pale sunlight streaming through the clouds. Photo by Benoît Deschasaux on Unsplash
Photo of a lighthouse on a small rock in a bay with the coastline clearly visible close behind. This is the first light designed to use Gustav Dalén's technology and it's located near Djurgården in Stockholm, Sweden. It has since been converted to run on electricity. (Courtesy: Holger Ellgard, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Photo of the Dalen museum in Stengstorp, which is a large white building with many windows. The photo is taken in twilight, and a light on a pillar burns outside it.
Poster with the words "Cinematographie Lumiere" in big lettering, over a crowd of people in typical 1900s clothing. A man in uniform is arguing with a man in religious garb in the centre.
A bunch of flowers in a vase. The flowers are a little blurry, but their colours - yellow, white, red and green - are still fairly vivid.
A photo of bright red flowers in a vase. The colours are very vivid
Black-and-white photo of Gabriel Lippmann. He's dressed formally, in a suit with a bow tie tucked beneath the collar, and he's wearing round spectacles. He has a large moustache with pointy, waxed ends.
A photo of the Matterhorn rising above an Alpine landscape. The colours are a little washed out, but do not appear artificially tinted
Photo showing Lonni Besançon on stage with other panellists Eungsang Lee and Yukari Ito
Avi Wigderson showing a slide listing the qualities displayed by Alan Turing, including fearlessness, self criticism, a deep desire to understand things theoretically and a breadth of interests and expertise
Photo of Avi Wigderson standing on a stage in front of a slide
Photo of David MacMillan on stage at HLF
Photo of Leslie Lamport on stage at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum
Snippet of an email reading: Dear Dr. M. Harris: Hello! I hope this letter brings you good luck. I am Penny, employed by several journals. I am honored to invite you to submit to this journal. As a journal editor who has been deeply involved in the field of academic publishing for many years, I would like to extend a sincere invitation to you on my own behalf and look forward to your professional insights in the fields of agricultural economics and oceanography.
A Google Streetview photo taken from the A9 between Thurso and Georgemas Junction. There’s a winter-bare hedge in the foreground, and the background is flat, empty fields
Screen shot of a press release on EurekAlert. The headline of the press release is "The evolution of life may have its origins in outer space". There's an image of a planet-forming disc in the centre of the press release.
Screenshot saying “There’s a cast iron law that everyone should follow, in all walks of life. If you have numbers that say one thing but users who say something else, then of course you shouldn’t ignore your numbers, but you definitely shouldn’t ignore your users. They are almost certainly telling you something important”
Slide describing the impacts of space weather, including satellite orbit decay, satellite disorientation, spacecraft damage, loss of GNSS geolocation and timing services and power grid failure
List of Slido questions with my own ("The second Trump administration has just proposed a budget for NASA that would gut its science funding, including the removal of all funding for 1 of 2 LIGO detectors and dozens of space missions. How is this likely to affect the future of the space sector?") highlighted. The first question asks about space sustainability and preserving scientific discovery.
Slide entitled "Three Waves of Innovation" showing images labelled "first space age" (Apollo astronaut with American flag on the Moon), "second space age" (a large instrument being attended by technicians in clean room gear) and "third space age" (smallsats, GPS and maps)
Image taken by the Perseverance rover of the night sky on Mars during a solar storm. The sky is very grainy and pixelated but it's also distinctly greenish. A lump of terrain is silhouetted against the sky at the bottom.
Artist's impression of an aurora on Mars, showing a starry sky glowing mostly green with some faintly blue-purple colour near a silhouetted bumpy horizon. The Perseverance rover is shown in the foreground, with its mast camera prominent. Credit: Alex McDougall-Page
A schematic illustration of the ancient dipolar magnetic field of Mars generated by a core dynamo process. The illustration contains an image of Mars with a 1/8th section taken out to reveal an internal core. White magnetic field lines loop around the planet.
Photo of the vibroseis truck, which has three sets of wheels and a large hydraulic system with thumpers attached. The truck is parked on the side of a road and you can't see much else because it's night, and therefore dark, but I'm pretty sure there are some pissed-off bears and bison in the background.
Two diagrams illustrating the unusual Arnold's tongue patterns observed in the experiment. When the experimenters mapped the laser's breathing frequency intensity in the parameter space of pump current and intracavity loss (shown in the first diagram), unusual features appeared. Areas contoured by blue dashed lines correspond to strong intensity, and represent the main synchronization regions. The second diagram shows the synchronization regions extracted from this map, which resembles a leaf rather than a straightforward triangular Arnold tongue.
A graph of a parameter labelled epsilon on the y axis and another parameter labelled alpha on the x axis. The graph contains a series of point-down triangles at alpha= 0, 1 and a handful of whole-number fractions in between. The whole-number fraction triangles are very elongated and tongue-like
Screenshot of a Google AI overview that reads: “If you enjoy the humor, satire, and unique world-building of Terry Pratchett, you might appreciate authors like Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Neverwhere), and Jasper Fforde (The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time).” There is no such book as The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time and the real author of The Curious *Incident* of the Dog in the Night-Time is Mark Haddon.
Photo of a sign cable tied to a metal fence that reads “Warning! Coopers Hill Cheese Roll CHEESE ROLLING IS A DANGEROUS ACTIVITY FOR PARTICIPANTS AND SPECTATORS! You attend entirely at your own rush “
Photo of a room containing electronics in racks. The room is glassed in for better temperature control and hundreds of red LEDs on the racks glow in the semi-darkness
A row of 12 large LCD screens displaying various graphs, dashboards and other indicators of the LHC's performance. Since the LHC was not running during my visit, all of these displays are showing old data, and are just for show.
Engineers Sam Pitman and Amelia Edwards standing next to one of the crab cavities they're testing. The crab cavity is inside a metallic framework with vacuum-tight flanges on the end.
A photo of the underside of the wheel-shaped ATLAS detector, showing a small fraction of the zillions of cables in the machine, each of them neatly fixed in place with a cable tie.
Photo of a display in a lift. It says we're at floor -2, -91.7 m underground. The CERN logo is on the display.
Photo of Karolos Potamianos standing inside the under-construction ITk. He's wearing a white lab coat and protective booties over his shoes, and he's just short enough to fit inside the 2m-tall barrel without ducking.
Photo looking along the ITk barrel, which is 2m high and 8m long and made of carbon fibre. A platform sits just inside the barrel, stopping at an inner ring containing clips where the silicon detector strips will be attached once they're ready.
View of the CERN Antimatter Factory from a platform near the entrance. It's a large, warehouse-like space, with a bright yellow horizontal support crane just below the ceiling and lots of cables running in pipes below it. A large rack of electronics with a person tending to them are visible in the foreground.
Photo of a big screen TV showing the movie Gettysburg in front of a row of Christmas stockings. Jeff Daniels is on the screen as Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, wearing Union army uniform and a big blonde moustache
Photo of the Jura Mountains behind the town of Saint-Genis de Pouilly, near CERN. The mountains are snow-capped and a line of medium-rise buildings lies between them and a green field with a track running through it in the foreground
Gophers and plants thriving in the once barren area scarred by the volcanic eruption, 2012.