Check out Daoyuan Qian's work describing analytical solution to Flory-Huggins model. Together with @MichaelsLabUCL in J Phys Chem L The Journal of Physical Chemistry ACS Publications pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

A moment from the Knowles Lab Christmas Dinner at St John's college St John's College, Cambridge. Thanks to everyone for coming!

The ACADEMIA

*Me trying to think of a random project to do in a meeting before the start of my PhD* PRX: seems cool let us put that online

Absolutely thrilling news on Professor Tuomas Knowles being elected as the new 1920 Professor of Physical Chemistry - big congratulations! You can read more on the appointment here: ch.cam.ac.uk/news/new-1920-…

import numpy as plt

Motility-induced phase separation! And I finally found its phenomenological description from SpongeBob:

PhD rejection season is here again - if you are one of those poor souls on Gradcafe please be reassured you are not alone (been there myself) and rejections don’t mean you are bad AT ALL :(

One-week referee report omfg this is either great or catastrophic

Experimentalist: if you can’t measure salt concentration you don’t know whether it partitions in or out of condensates. Theoretician: hold my vodka…

Physicists have one skill: Taylor expanding everything to first order. Here, we did one Taylor expansion. And somehow this rigorously addressed condensate formation with an arbitrary number of components. Cambridge go burrrrr

Peak graphics design competency: not having NatRevPhys re-make Figure 1b!!!

By plotting some old datasets with prettier colour schemes, we developed a new theoretical framework and are gonna keep publishing these nice figures :D

Nah, that's merely what the overly optimistic young guns, AGI startup fund raisers, and self-deluded technologists. For most "serious" folks, the correct statement is: "Human-level AI is always 10-20 years away" 😂😂😂

QFT is just applied statistical mechanics.

If you make a ice cream cheesecake with cheesecake-flavoured ice cream, do you just get a cheesecake? If not, does that mean the dual of a dual space in physics is NOT the original space, unlike in maths?

“How do we explain this data?? These experiments involve proteins, salt, buffers, proton, …” “Idk bruh just calculate the charge and square it, that’s probably it 😬”

Mathematicians 🧐: SO(3) is double-covered by the simply connected SU(2) and has fundamental group isomorphic to ℤ/2ℤ Physicists 🤪: so you know, if you just roll something downhill, it rolls over itself twice in each period? arxiv.org/abs/2407.19861

When you can’t measure something experimentally, just give up and construct a whole new framework that doesn’t require that measurement instead.

If you roll a ball down a ramp, you find the hairy ball theorem and doubly-connectedness of SO(3) ⚽️ seas.harvard.edu/news/2025/03/g…