David Quintero

Physicist in atmospheric sciences, but mainly Jack of all trades and master of none. Canary Islands, Spain.

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Last Notes

2026-02-08 22:19:03 UTC

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@nprofile…3sng me pasa igual. Creo que es el resultado de una actualización. No sé si se puede revertir. A mí no me parece incómodo, pero entiendo que haya gente a la que no le guste.

2026-02-08 22:13:40 UTC

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@nprofile…g0zc is it necessary to have watched Battlestar Galactica? I didn't finish it. I liked the story, but the young characters, the space pilots, were a bit insufferable.

2026-02-07 00:15:17 UTC

What's your opinion on "Love, Death and Robots"? For me, some good ideas mixed with absolutely empty and/or horrendous chapters.

2026-02-07 00:04:03 UTC

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@nprofile…u6vt sorry for the delayed answer. I think that the design seems a mix of ideas (attention, feed forward neural networks) connected in a very specific way. That seems very specific, very concrete, so more artificial than natural. Of course, this is just a point of view, indeed in physics (my field) there has been a lot of debate about wether naturalness is important or not.

2026-02-06 01:12:10 UTC

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@nprofile…f5cp I'm interested in your opinion once you've finished it. I know the book. If it were a recent book I wouldn't have looked at it twice, but having the age it has, I'm intrigued if it really has something.

2026-02-05 16:47:40 UTC

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@nprofile…cl62 do the typical Android apps still work in a Fairphone?

2026-02-04 23:14:03 UTC

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@nprofile…qlgd thanks! I should definitely look at it.

2026-02-03 12:50:42 UTC

Polemic thought of the day: I guess some of you have seen the architecture of a Transformer (the ML tool, not the alien robots). It looks so contrived and unnatural (a new case of a physicist obsessed with naturalness). Yes, I'm sure there're good reasons for each step, but the overall design looks so forced. It makes me think that they can't be the last word, even although they are the among the leading tools nowadays.
If you look at other competing architectures, like a convolutional or a graph neural network, you feel that there's an idea there, an idea that is simple, elegant and physically sounded.

2026-02-03 12:14:12 UTC

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@nprofile…ck2y did you buy the flour to cook a dessert?

2026-01-30 23:58:16 UTC

Regarding the question "will we ever be able to understand everything?", it's curious the position of the philosopher Daniel Dennet. He considers that if you can understand something to ask a question, then you're already equipped to understand the answer, and you will understand it.
Whiteson and Warner are surprised by this, and me too. For instance, I can see a mathematical derivation where I don't understand what happened from one step to the next. I can ask the question but I'm clueless. (This has certainly happened to me!)
Am I (we) able to understand *anything* I ask about, if I formulate a sensible question and had I infinite time and resources? I find this hard to believe, but it was a curious idea and I just wanted to share it.
It can be that Dennet was referring to the species as a whole, not concrete humans. Still, an interesting but debatable point.

2026-01-30 00:21:55 UTC

If dark matter exists and interacts only gravitationally (Ethan Siegel wrote today about it), its nature will be locked from us. I think it would be the first time in history that we know that the universe is hiding a scientific truth from us, forever.

2026-01-28 21:59:04 UTC

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@nprofile…r9em I send you hugs and my best wishes.

2026-01-28 18:52:19 UTC

In his last AMA, Sean Carroll says that thinking in terms of the 4 fundamental forces is a bit old fashioned. Not wrong, no, but that nowadays people prefer to think in terms of fields. The field is the central actor.

2026-01-28 16:16:30 UTC

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@nprofile…chhn I haven't read it entirely, but Math Girls, by Hiroshi Yuki, was a book I was enjoying.

2026-01-28 08:33:35 UTC

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@nprofile…4hp5 @nprofile…g0zc @nprofile…ck2y the axiom of universes really blew out my mind and I wish it were necessary!

2026-01-27 23:56:11 UTC

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@nprofile…ck2y @nprofile…g0zc BTW, another source of surprise could be the fact that even being described by mathematics, we can understand that them. The rules could be unreachable for us (they could still be, I guess), but it's a surprise that we have been able to go so far.

2026-01-27 23:42:35 UTC

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@nprofile…ck2y @nprofile…g0zc I was thinking not in total randomness, but yes, these universes (understood as containers) would probably not be able to have life. But I don't think their existence is _necessarily_ forbidden.

2026-01-27 22:51:16 UTC

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@nprofile…ck2y @nprofile…g0zc curiously, it surprises me, in the sense that there could exist a universe without enough patterns or regularities to be described mathematically, or by something that could be called mathematics.

2026-01-27 22:33:58 UTC

Greg Chaitin on famous physicist John Wheeler asking Gödel about uncertainty: 'Well, one day I was at the Institute for Advanced Study, and I went to Gödel's office, and there was Gödel. I said "Professor Gödel, what connection do you see between your incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?" And Gödel got angry and threw me out of his office!'
Whiteson and Warner tell this in their book. Others say that Gödel just changed the topic of the conversation (which it seems more plausible to me). Anyway, W & W explain that in physics you look for the axioms instead of building from them, which "sidesteps incompleteness". You are constantly adding extra axioms whenever you need them, which is something that is not seen as elegant, mathematically speaking.

2026-01-25 22:43:21 UTC

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BTW, the academy seems to be working. There're people with children, a demanding job, the house chores... that are willing to pay that amount to hear, after a long day, a professor talking, with equations on a board, about the deepest questions on the nature of reality.

2026-01-25 22:41:17 UTC

There's an academy in Spain offering different courses in Physics online. Here's one that interests me a lot: Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. The professor comes from the University and is an expert on the topic.
Although it's in Spanish, you can check the syllabus. There're super cool stuff that I know nothing about like quantum contextuality, Kochen-Spekkens theorem Fubini-Study metric or the quantum pigeonhole principle (you can put 3 pigeons in 2 holes ?!!?). Other stuff I know, like Bell inequalities or the quantum no cloning theorem.
It sounds amazing. The handicap? It costs 400 €. There're 20 hours, so we have 20 hours per class, which I know is not expensive, taking into account you're hearing an expert in the matter. But 400 euros...
Fundamentos de la Mecánica Cuántica – Cuentos Cuánticos
https://ccuanticos.academy/fundamentos-de-la-mecanica-cuantica/

2026-01-25 10:05:20 UTC

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@nprofile…9xhj beautiful!

2026-01-24 01:46:50 UTC

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@nprofile…qm6f thanks for the reference! It seems that Galileo and Neptune is mentioned in Nature 287: 311-13, Kowal and Still Stillman. Perhaps the book just focuses on Adams and Le Verrier.

2026-01-23 21:53:12 UTC

TIL: Galileo discovered Neptune without knowing it! When he was observing through his telescope Jupiter and its moons, those years Neptune was, apparently, next to Jupiter. Indeed, it was brighter than the moons from Jupiter. Galileo draw it in his notebook, but he thought it was a "fixed star".

2026-01-21 15:59:17 UTC

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@nprofile…8qh7 I still like cosmology a lot. You need GR and QFT for it. GR I like it, too and have tried not to forget it. QFT attracts me a little bit less. It's necessary, too, but I wonder how much QFT the average cosmologist knows.

2026-01-21 00:24:19 UTC

My favourite subject as undergraduate was cosmology. It was an optional subject of the last year, and it was my last exam.

2026-01-20 21:46:10 UTC

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@nprofile…g0zc not sure if I'll be able to follow it, but it certainly looks intriguing.

2026-01-19 23:11:30 UTC

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@nprofile…ejn8 congratulations!!

2026-01-18 20:52:39 UTC

It's interesting how Whiteson and Warner, in his book, remark that the Planck length (calculated combining G, c and h to have units of length) is just an hypothesis. It's not clear, and certainly hasn't been proved, that that length exists, nor it necessarily would have that value.

2026-01-16 13:17:56 UTC

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@nprofile…wc5v algo hace Sean Carroll (mitad físico, mitad filósofo) en su podcast, tanto en los AMA como según los invitados: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ , aunque tampoco es el tema principal, ni mucho menos.

2026-01-13 22:51:03 UTC

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@nprofile…4hp5 I wonder if the Gell-Mann matrices of SU(3) can be deduced, too, or they are found just from the commutation relations of SU(3).

2026-01-12 08:57:08 UTC

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@nprofile…lqgq vaya, Belén, qué buena reseña. Dan ganas de leerlo de inmediato.

2026-01-11 11:34:22 UTC

Interesting bit by Ned Block in Sean Carroll's podcast about a clue that could point out that a LLM is conscious: train it without discourses in the first person (I do, I think, I can, I, I..., all of them removed from your training data), and check if in spite of that it creates a discourse using the first person.

2026-01-10 10:56:37 UTC

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@nprofile…97ud well, he also said that radiologists will be out of work in few years and he was clearly wrong (fortunately).

2026-01-10 10:49:47 UTC

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@nprofile…sz8l @nprofile…4hp5 @nprofile…8qh7 wow, I didn't know of these two explanations. The one by FitzGerald, trying to explain the contraction appealing to another known effect, seems a genuine piece of good science.

2026-01-09 23:10:53 UTC

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@nprofile…xp9n @nprofile…wjmx it's true, but I think that there're many QM books, and not everyone can write an inspired textbook on the matter.

2026-01-06 21:32:55 UTC

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@nprofile…g0zc wow, and I have to confess that, at least at first sight, I can't explain those tricks. Were they explained in the books?

2026-01-05 22:07:14 UTC

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@nprofile…lqgq está chulo, Belén. La regularidad de acudir a la cabalgata ha tenido su recompensa.

2026-01-04 15:32:51 UTC

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@nprofile…plq9 thanks. Do you use any specific application to edit spreadsheets in your phone?

2026-01-04 10:50:51 UTC

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(This should have been a poll).

2026-01-04 10:49:56 UTC

Time to say goodbye to Goodreads. Now the question is, Bookwyrm or Storygraph? #books #bookstodon

2025-12-31 15:20:03 UTC

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@nprofile…q9t0 impresionante, Belén. Yo he leído 22, menos que otros años, la verdad. Entre mis favoritos, El mito de Sísifo (Camus), Hacia los confines del mundo (Thompson), Si Einstein lo hubiera sabido (Aspect), La saga de los Marx (Goytisolo), por decir algunos.

2025-12-31 00:19:46 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua @nprofile…stct impressive, thanks.

2025-12-31 00:04:15 UTC

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@nprofile…stct that painting definitely has something.

2025-12-31 00:00:14 UTC

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@nprofile…psz3 organised by the Dominion (Star Trek)?

2025-12-30 16:05:57 UTC

The second season of Invasion is in my opinion better than the first one. I'm intrigued.

2025-12-30 11:28:01 UTC

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@nprofile…00p2 actually no, indeed between locality and realism I also drop locality.

2025-12-30 00:12:09 UTC

I'm finishing Alain Aspect's book, and unsurprisingly it's very good. It can be a popular book, but I would say it shouldn't be your first popular book on QM. The appendices offer more details, like a lovely proof of Bell's inequalities (the CHSH version). Now I'm close to read the proof about the no cloning theorem. I expect the same clarity.
Can you guess what does he retain between realims or locality?......... yes, he keeps realism! Aspect says that he abandons locality, but he insists that is a form of no locality that still forbids useful superluminal communication. Another physicist that I know that has abandoned locality is Sean Carroll. (Indeed Carroll said that he was working or wanted to work on why the universe looks so much as local when it really isn't).
Aspect also mentions superdeterminism... clearly not in favor. #physics

2025-12-27 00:04:40 UTC

Sometimes you don't like a book that is considered a classic or that most people consider good. It may happen. It has even happened to scholars. You approached the book in a neutral way and you didn't like it.
But sometimes you actually *want* to like a book, but you can't! It happened to me with Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy. I really wanted to like it, but I couldn't: overwritten, excessive. I read Red Mars, was able to finish Green Mars skipping many parts and didn't have energy to grab Blue Mars. (I emjoyed a lot KSR Aurora, though).
Has this happened to you and with what book?

2025-12-25 13:34:50 UTC

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@nprofile…p2ps es un párrafo muy potente, sí. Gracias a ti por leerlo.

2025-12-25 11:26:15 UTC

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@nprofile…q9t0 pues sí, Belén, totalmente de acuerdo. Ver el sol un día más es todo un logro, y pasar unos días tranquilos es la mejor forma de pasar estos días. Gracias por tu sensibilidad y por tu contenido. Ojalá viviésemos más cerca🙂

2025-12-25 11:10:28 UTC

The end of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is an incredibly powerful way to wish everyone a merry Christmas:
"She sat in the audience thinking - someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshiped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved."

2025-12-23 22:05:41 UTC

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@nprofile…jsrg happy holidays!

2025-12-22 11:58:32 UTC

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@nprofile…nf6m ¿¿deja a su mujer por una liebre??

2025-12-21 14:02:14 UTC

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@nprofile…zdkz I have to ask: I see numpy, but what other module have you used?

2025-12-20 11:33:41 UTC

Hearing "Retronautas", a Spanish podcast about science fiction, they comment how most of the sf writer of the 70s lost interest in the Solar System once the data from the exploration probes began to appear, and these data showed how unsuitable for humans the Solar System is.
One of the exceptions was Arthur C. Clarke, who kept a great interest in the data from the probes and in the Solar System, as his works shown. I wonder if this could be linked with the low interest he had in the characters or in their development.

2025-12-19 13:46:23 UTC

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@nprofile…578r I see myself reflected. I can agree going to the lunch or dinner and then leaving, but staying later in a pub or disco, definitely not for me. I take these big social events in very small and separated doses.

2025-12-17 18:08:00 UTC

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@nprofile…q9t0 vaya, Belén, y la leíste en francés, qué bueno.

2025-12-15 00:20:43 UTC

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@nprofile…jsrg same to you!

2025-12-14 02:11:11 UTC

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@nprofile…stct it's a very weird movie, but I liked it.

2025-12-13 15:54:39 UTC

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@nprofile…578r @nprofile…y0ah exactly, and the fact that both reasoning lines coincide gave Bohr confidence in the completeness of QM.

2025-12-13 15:50:50 UTC

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@nprofile…y0ah yes, I think Aspect refers to this modern thinking. He claims that Heisenberg's relations cna be divided in dispersion relations (the mathematical fact, valid for all observables, rooted in the Fourier transform), and the uncertainty relations, derived from that experiment of the microscope. The fact that they coincide is what makes Bohr (and I guess others, too) confident in QM being complete.

2025-12-13 15:46:13 UTC

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@nprofile…stct wonderful! He was resting, preparing for an even bigger trip.

2025-12-13 14:19:21 UTC

Interesting bit by Alain Aspect on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
Heidenberg's Uncertainty Principle can be seen as a property of the Fourier transforms between space and momentum, but you can also think in more experimental terms, like an electron moving that is illuminated by a photon and then observed through a lens with some angular aperture.
This setting is sometimes called the "Heisenberg's microscope". If you perform the calculations, you obtain exactly the uncertainty given by the mathematical properties of the Fourier transform! This gave Bohr reasons to suggest the complete character of QM.

2025-12-12 23:27:37 UTC

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@nprofile…stct 😅

2025-12-12 20:09:19 UTC

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@nprofile…stct it has been a great story. I followed the whereabouts of that air tag with more interest than some TV series I'm paying for.

2025-12-11 23:44:46 UTC

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@nprofile…22u8 after the first season I haven't watched it again. In my opinion it's clearly behind DS9 and TNG.

2025-12-10 11:10:53 UTC

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@nprofile…frzp @nprofile…8eua @nprofile…stct that's a great example, I think.

2025-12-10 00:18:07 UTC

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@nprofile…ztfm thanks, I should look at it. ! I'm glad that the camera performs sometimes a zoom.

2025-12-09 20:47:46 UTC

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@nprofile…stct regarding the mysteries by Jessica Fletcher, an uncle of mine said that the coincidences of her presence and the murders were so striking that the only explanation was the she was committing the crimes.

2025-12-09 20:44:34 UTC

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@nprofile…stct @nprofile…4x5t quite impressive!!

2025-12-09 12:03:17 UTC

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@nprofile…4x5t @nprofile…stct did you (both) enjoy that book? I haven't read it yet because I know more or less the topic although I've read it's good, somehow I'm not in the mood for it.

2025-12-09 08:40:35 UTC

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@nprofile…stct I'm impressed by your calmness. If all that would have happened to me, I would be very stressed.

2025-12-06 10:57:52 UTC

Wild hypothesis: the number of science fiction books that deal with extraterrestrial civilizations has declined in the last decades compared to the XXth century.

2025-12-05 12:41:19 UTC

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@nprofile…uvfj yo uso Qobuz. Es una pequeña empresa y creo que es la segunda que mejor paga a los artistas de todas las plataformas. Su catálogo es amplio, y es especialmente completo en clásica y jazz, o sea, cumple prácticamente todo lo que más aprecio

2025-12-05 09:29:55 UTC

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@nprofile…5x6w thanks!

2025-12-05 09:16:30 UTC

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@nprofile…ztfm I have none, just the title of the book that you can find in Google books: https://books.google.es/books/about/New_Foundations_for_Physical_Geometry.html?id=cXXqAgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

2025-12-05 09:13:56 UTC

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@nprofile…00p2 if I remember correctly, with geometric algebra you can reduce the Maxwell equations to just one (instead of 2 using tensors and forms), but you lose the covariance of the equations, so I guess that the moral is beware of the excess of simplification.

2025-12-05 00:06:41 UTC

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@nprofile…pklh incredibly intriguing. Mass hysteria in some violent form?

2025-12-04 23:19:48 UTC

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@nprofile…5x6w interesting and beautiful. I don't know the author.

2025-12-04 23:09:08 UTC

"New Foundations of Physical Geometry" is a book by Tim Maudlin where he proposes to build a different topology, better suited for physics.
He suggests using the line instead of the open set as a building block for the physical space. And his second proposal is that time is what endows the space-time its definitive geometry. And then he proceeds.
I'm not qualified to judge his work, because I haven't read it and because my knowledge of topology, as a physicist, is pretty scarce. But I have heard positive things from Maudlin. He's a Bohmian, half physicist, half philosopher, in the vein of people like Sean Carroll. I watched once a video of Maudlin explaining the implications of Bell's result and I liked it.

2025-12-04 10:12:57 UTC

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@nprofile…s87z I'm sorry for what happened to you. I'm sure you did a superb work. Wishing you all the best luck and a new great job asap.

2025-12-03 08:44:04 UTC

More stressed at work lately and my lower back is already in pain...

2025-12-02 18:03:53 UTC

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@nprofile…yjla favouriting it to revisit on some occasions.

2025-12-01 08:15:25 UTC

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@nprofile…pklh thank you very much!

2025-11-30 12:29:56 UTC

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@nprofile…c034 ¿fue en La Laguna, con motivo de la semana del jazz?

2025-11-29 23:18:43 UTC

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@nprofile…nf6m interesante. Supuestamente es la serie de la franquicia con más mala prensa. Ya contarás cómo evoluciona..;)

2025-11-27 11:09:18 UTC

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@nprofile…nf6m os he empezado a oír por Antenna Pod.

2025-11-27 00:07:23 UTC

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@nprofile…jsrg one of my favourite authors ever, but I have to say that his books are very hard (and I don't mean difficult to read).

2025-11-27 00:03:35 UTC

I learnt some new stuff in Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe episode "Relativistic beaming". For instance, it's a mystery how super massive black holes in the center of galaxies form (it doesn't seem that they're the result of collapsing stars). And it's a mystery how they accumulated such mass so early in the universe.

2025-11-25 11:07:10 UTC

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@nprofile…q9t0 muy bonito, Belén

2025-11-24 22:02:15 UTC

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@nprofile…00p2 thank you👍

2025-11-24 21:26:04 UTC

I met my ex girlfriend in the social dance tonight. I knew she was going to be there and the moments before I was really nervous, and also while dancing the first two songs. But after that I relaxed, not entirely, but I certainly relaxed. I even danced a couple of songs with her and talked a minute or so about trivial stuff.
So I think I'm proud of myself, if I may say so. I did it well tonight. I wish I wouldn't be so nervous in the moments before, but this will be hard, since I'm a *really* nervous person. Perhaps it's just a matter of (a lot of) time. But I'm certainly forgetting her, and that's good. Hope to continue like that.

2025-11-23 23:52:30 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua following you here, in your blog, is a source of wonderful stuff. Thanks for everything.

2025-11-23 01:15:01 UTC

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@nprofile…jsrg I think you just need time. Do not force yourself. You will heal. I send you strength for the process.

2025-11-22 16:28:10 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua indeed I appreciate them a lot! Thank you very much for your time and corrections👍

2025-11-22 14:17:05 UTC

Last thing happening in Spain now, with the crazy prices of houses and flats: ask for loan in a bank, then in another bank, then another... buy as many flats as possible and rent them, mostly to foreigners, with a higher purchasing power.
The "human factor", as Graham Greene put it, plus capitalism is an incredibly dangerous combination.

2025-11-21 23:46:31 UTC

In my great delay watching series, I'm now with chapter 4 of Invasion. I'm not super seduced but I'll continue, for the moment.

2025-11-21 20:26:07 UTC

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@nprofile…4h0w I would like to read it!

2025-11-21 16:28:25 UTC

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@nprofile…4h0w what is it about?