I study the Universe. I am a professor of physics and astronomy, and I have spent my career thinking about big quantitative questions. So when I tell you that we are running out of atmosphere, I do not mean it metaphorically. I mean it physically.

Every year we delay the energy transition, we lock in more warming, more wildfires, more crop failures, more climate refugees, more dead coral, more dead children from heat and smoke and storm. The physics does not negotiate. The carbon we put in the air this decade will be heating the planet long after every politician currently asking for our vote is dead. There is no “moderate” position on this. There is action, and there is acceleration toward global destruction. Everything in between is just acceleration with extra steps.

That is the lens through which Californians need to look at the June primary ballot. And through that lens, a vote for Xavier Becerra is a vote against the planet our children will inherit.

What the Science Actually Says

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Synthesis Report (2023) is the most authoritative statement we have on what climate change is doing to human civilization. It is sobering reading. The Panel finds, with high confidence, that warming is already driving:

• Food insecurity and a slowdown in agricultural productivity, with crop productivity growth in Africa shrinking by roughly a third since 1961, and projected to worsen sharply with further warming.

• Severe water scarcity affecting about half the global population for at least one month per year.

• Ocean acidification, sea level rise, and salinization of coastal aquifers and farmland.

• Accelerating biodiversity loss, with adaptation already reaching its limits in some ecosystems.

• The spread of vector-borne diseases (malaria, West Nile, Lyme) into new regions.

• Displacement of more than 20 million people from their homes every year since 2008.

• Roughly 3 to 3.6 billion people now living in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change.

The IPCC is explicit that with further warming, these risks become compounding and cascading, with climate-driven food insecurity and supply instability interacting with land competition, pandemics, and conflict. We are not talking about an inconvenience. We are talking about the destabilization of the biophysical systems on which human civilization is built.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the body founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project veterans that maintains the Doomsday Clock, agrees. Climate change has been one of the existential threats it formally tracks since 2007. In January 2026 the Bulletin set the Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest to catastrophe it has ever been, citing nuclear weapons, climate change, biotechnology, and ungoverned AI together as the principal existential risks to humanity.

The Future of Life Institute, founded by physicist Max Tegmark and other scientists to study and reduce existential risk, lists exactly the same four categories of large-scale threat to human survival: climate change, pandemics, nuclear weapons, and ungoverned AI. When the world’s leading existential-risk researchers list the things that could end human civilization, climate change is on every list.

This is not a partisan position. This is the scientific consensus.

The Clock Is Already Running

How much time do we actually have?

The 2025 Indicators of Global Climate Change report (Forster et al., from an international team of more than 60 scientists tracking climate indicators between IPCC assessments) estimated the remaining carbon budget for a 50% chance of holding warming to 1.5°C at roughly 130 gigatonnes of CO2 as of the start of 2025. At current emissions of about 42 gigatonnes per year, that is around three years. Three. The 2025 Global Carbon Budget update put the 1.5°C figure at about 170 gigatonnes, or four years. The budget for 1.7°C is about a decade. The budget for 2°C is around two decades and shrinking.

That is the time horizon. Not “by 2100.” Not “for future generations.” Now. The decisions California’s next Governor makes in their first term will determine whether we squander what little budget remains or use it to bend the curve.

The False Choice

The defining lie of climate politics in 2026 is that climate responsibility and affordability are opposed, that Californians have to choose between a livable planet and a livable budget. Becerra has built his climate pitch around exactly this framing: a “pragmatic” transition, slower targets, easier on industry, and (as he announced in a recent debate) easier on the Kern County drillers he had opposed as Attorney General.

It is a false choice. The numbers say so plainly.

I teach Physics 14 at UC Irvine, our undergraduate course on energy, environment, and climate. Every quarter, my students work through the actual physics of our energy system, and every quarter they finish with the same conclusion: a fully renewable, carbon-free energy system is achievable within our existing technological and financial constraints. The path exists. The only question is whether we have the political will to take it.

Lazard’s 2025 Levelized Cost of Energy report, the industry-standard analysis used by utilities, banks, and grid planners, finds that utility-scale solar and onshore wind are the most cost-effective forms of new-build generation in the United States, even on an unsubsidized basis. New solar comes in as low as $38 per megawatt-hour. Onshore wind starts around $37. New combined-cycle gas runs $48 to $107. New nuclear sits at $141 to $220. Wind and solar are not just competitive. They are, by a substantial margin, the cheapest electricity humanity has ever produced, and the fastest to deploy.

Add in the costs we currently externalize (the asthma, the heart attacks, the wildfire smoke, the flooded basements, the collapsing insurance markets, the lost agricultural yields), and fossil fuels are not just more expensive. They are not in the same league.

So when a politician tells you that aggressive climate action will hurt working families, ask: more expensive than what? More expensive than the cheapest electricity humanity has ever produced? More expensive than the fires that just burned through Los Angeles? More expensive than the homeowners insurance market unraveling across this state?

The affordability argument against climate action is not an argument. It is a talking point. And it is a talking point with a paymaster.

Who Pays for the Talking Point

The cheapest energy in human history dismantles the most profitable business model in human history. That is not a coincidence. That is the entire fight. Cheap solar plus cheap wind plus cheap storage plus cheap heat pumps plus cheap EVs is an existential threat to every oil major on Earth, because it converts their reserves into stranded assets and their political influence into a sunset industry.

So they spend. They lobby. They donate. They fund “moderate” Democrats willing to slow-walk the transition: politicians who soften the framing, oppose the bills that would make polluters pay, reopen the drilling fields, and shake hands with Chevron while calling it pragmatism.

Becerra accepted a $39,200 donation from Chevron for his gubernatorial campaign. As California Attorney General, he opposed proposed legislation that would have made fossil fuel companies pay for the climate damages they knowingly caused. The Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund gave him a C+ on its environmental scorecard. Greenpeace USA gave him a D on its 2026 California Climate Leadership Scorecard, supporting only two of nine climate benchmarks. And in the May debate, he reversed his AG-era position and said he would support reopening oil drilling in Kern County.

By contrast, Greenpeace gave Katie Porter and Tom Steyer A grades on the same scorecard. Porter scored 100% on the League of Conservation Voters Scorecard during her time in Congress and held oil companies accountable for spills and gas-price gouging as chair of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight.

Big Oil knows the difference. So should we.

I Am Voting for Katie Porter

I am voting for Katie Porter. She has built her career on the positions of everyday Californians, on holding the powerful accountable, and on telling the truth about how money distorts public policy. She is the kind of person we need at this moment: someone who reads the science, says what it says, and is not for sale to the industry whose business model depends on burning the planet.

If California had ranked choice voting (and we should), I would rank Tom Steyer second. He has spent his fortune and the better part of two decades trying to force American politics to take climate seriously, and his A grade on the Greenpeace scorecard is earned.

But we do not have ranked choice voting yet. We have a single vote in a crowded field, and the stakes are not rhetorical. A vote for a D-graded candidate, funded by Chevron, eager to reopen oil fields, and offering “affordability” as cover for delay, is a vote for the fossil fuel industry’s preferred timeline. That timeline ends with the destruction of the climatic conditions under which our species developed civilization.

A vote for Katie Porter is a vote for the cheapest, fastest, and most just energy transition humanity is capable of, and against the industry actively trying to prevent it.

The carbon budget gives us three years. The Doomsday Clock gives us 85 seconds. The choice is clarifying.

Vote like the planet depends on it.

It does.

On Saturday, April 25, the Mayor of Irvine texted me in the morning. He wanted to meet that afternoon. We sat down at 2 p.m. at a coffee shop near UC Irvine. My son’s birthday party was at four.

Within two minutes, the Mayor told me he was removing me from the City’s Sustainability Commission. The reason, he said, was that I’d released a report three days earlier that he disagreed with. He said he wanted the removal in place before the Council meeting on Tuesday.

By Wednesday, I’d been reinstated.

In the four days between, the Irvine City Council voted down the policy item my removal was apparently meant to support. A sitting Councilmember called the whole spectacle “theater of the absurd” from the dais. And a longtime volunteer for the Mayor’s prior campaigns gave a public comment asking him to step down.

That’s what happened. What I want to do here is walk through the public record, which is unusually clear in this case, and tell you what I think it shows.

(Video clips of the moments referenced below are available in the appendix at the end of this post.)

The Report

On April 22 I released the Climate Crisis Action Report, an Earth Day update to a report I’d written for the city in 2021 on Irvine’s renewable-energy potential. Its scope is the City’s full climate picture, not just one sector. I also highlighted the report in an Irvine Watchdog Op-Ed.

My 2026 report’s starting point is the 2019 greenhouse gas inventory the city released in 2023. Total community-wide emissions for Irvine that year came to about 2.25 million metric tons of CO₂-equivalent (MTCO₂e). Three sectors dominate:

• On-road transportation: 1,144,205 MTCO₂e, 51% of the total. Gasoline and diesel burned on Irvine roads.

• Electricity, residential plus non-residential: 501,715 MTCO₂e, 22%. The carbon attached to the electrons flowing into our homes and businesses, mostly from fossil-fired generation upstream of the wire.

• Natural gas burned in buildings: 335,322 MTCO₂e, 15%. Stoves, furnaces, water heaters, dryers, burning a fossil fuel.

Together those three sectors account for 88% of Irvine’s emissions. Everything else, including municipal operations, off-road vehicles, water, wastewater, and waste, makes up the remaining 12%.

Just to give the big picture as a physicist: when 88% of a problem sits in three buckets, those are the three buckets you go after. The smaller items are still important, but they are an order of magnitude or more smaller than the dominant terms, and the carbon math is the carbon math. The report makes this concrete in a chapter on urban forestry: offsetting Irvine’s community emissions through tree planting alone would require roughly 75 million new trees a year, against a City plan to plant 1,900. A tree is a good thing. Seventy-five million trees is not a policy. As a scientist working to find an optimal solution, you go where the numbers are, and they point to changing these top three carbon emission sources, not political theater.

The recommendations in the report follow the numbers, sector by sector. For natural gas, the largest pollutant inside the homes our kids breathe in: halt new gas infrastructure now and provide loans for the conversion of existing buildings to electric heat pumps and induction. For transportation, the largest sector overall: a municipal EV purchase-loan program, fast charging at every city park and large multi-family complex, and an electric-bus-forward redesign of the Irvine CONNECT shuttle so that it stops being, by my analysis, a small net carbon emitter. For electricity: enroll the City of Irvine’s accounts in OCPA’s 100% Renewable Choice tier, and scale municipal financing so residents can install rooftop solar, batteries, and heat pumps at zero upfront cost.

A note on that last sector, since it’s where things got contested this week. OCPA’s default tier, “Basic Choice,” came in at roughly 942 pounds of CO₂ per megawatt-hour in 2024. SCE’s default came in at 515. The report doesn’t hide from that number. But the recommendation isn’t to leave OCPA. It’s to opt up. OCPA also offers Smart Choice and 100% Renewable Choice tiers, both of which beat SCE on carbon. Leaving OCPA gives up local control of procurement. Opting up uses that control. The rate disparity that’s driving the political pressure, meanwhile, is mostly a state-level exit fee called the PCIA, which the statewide CCA association has now formally challenged in court. And, we expect SCE to increase their rates in June.

The report was scheduled for presentation to the Commission members at the Sustainability Commission’s May 13 meeting. Three days after I released it, I was sitting in a coffee shop with the Mayor.

At Council

Item 5.5 on the April 28 council agenda was a proposal to move Irvine from OCPA to SCE. Councilmember Treseder moved to delete it. Councilmember Go seconded. Three voted yes (Treseder, Go, Mai), two voted no (Agran, Carroll), two abstained (Liu, Martinez Franco). Under Irvine municipal code, abstentions count as ayes. The item was deleted five to two.

Dr. Treseder, who has been on council nearly four years, didn’t pretend this was the first time around the block:

“I’ve been on the Council for almost four years, and that time, I think this is the 10th time that the mayor has agendized attacking OCPA. It happens pretty regularly. Each time, the Council has voted it down, each time.”

Then she named the dynamic in the chamber:

“Most of the people who have been here speaking against this item are the mayor’s people. And you can tell who they are. They tend to be the ones who rely more on bullying than on speaking to the facts. And I think it’s almost become, I feel like, a theater of the absurd, where we all know up here who Larry’s people are. … We all know who the mayor’s people are. And we’re being kind of required to ignore that up here and pretend like these are all independent commenters.”

On my removal:

“We have seen… the mayor’s commissioners come in and speak and always support the mayor. But this time, this latest time with [Dr. Abazajian], he did not. And so he was removed.”

One thing Dr. Treseder mentioned from the dais deserves to sit on its own. She had previously gone to significant institutional effort to get the Mayor access to the unredacted power purchasing agreements that govern OCPA’s electricity procurement. Those are the actual contracts. They show, in non-public detail, what’s being bought and at what price. The Mayor had insisted he needed to see them in order to evaluate OCPA.

“And that took a lot of work. … None of the mayor’s staff ever looked at it.”

Sit with that for a second. The contracts the Mayor said he needed in order to evaluate OCPA were obtained at significant institutional cost. No one on his staff read them.

Councilmember Carroll voted against the deletion on procedural grounds. He thought the Council should hear the item rather than delete it outright. That’s a reasonable view, and we disagreed about it. But he didn’t pretend the floor was new. Of Treseder’s tenth-time observation he said, simply, “It has been heard numerous times, indeed it has.” From the dais, he addressed me directly, with a generosity I want to put on the record:

“I do want to speak to my working colleague and friend Kev, the president of the Democrats of Greater Irvine. … I’d consider you for sustainability. I already have someone in the slot, and we’d have to work some things out, but it’s not my election year, so I would consider it.”

We disagreed on the procedural vote, and he was kind to me on the record. Both belong in any honest account.

The public microphone delivered surprises of its own. Doug Elliott, who serves on OCPA's Community Advisory Committee, spoke twice. The first time he borrowed his frame from An Inconvenient Truth and called my removal “a tragic loss for Irvine,” adding that "the public interest is best served when commissioners can exercise their independent judgment on matters within their jurisdiction." The second time, on the deletion of Item 5.5 itself, he called the recurring OCPA-attack agenda items “Groundhog Day” and reminded the chamber, plainly, that “we're not going to get to sustainability without OCPA.” Jeremy Ficarola, who said he’d volunteered hours to the Mayor’s previous campaigns, used his minute to ask the Mayor to step down (see video record below).

A Critique, Briefly Engaged

One of the Mayor’s surrogates spoke during public comment to challenge the report. The critique had three threads worth addressing.

The first was that the report’s title page, which lists my affiliations with the Sustainability Commission and the university, “could be taken to imply” institutional endorsement. The report addresses this directly on page 5, in a section titled “Authorship and Scope,” which states that the document “should be read as a commissioner’s perspective intended to stimulate discussion, not as an adopted position of the Commission or the City.” The disclaimer is in the document, in plain English, immediately after the introduction.

The second was an insinuation that I’d been compensated “in any way” for the report. For the record: no. I’ve done volunteer civic work on Irvine environmental committees for five years. This report included. I am a salaried faculty member at UC Irvine, as the title page indicates, but no one — UC Irvine, the City, OCPA, anyone — paid me to write this report or shaped its conclusions.

The third was that the report ignores the California Renewable Portfolio Standard, the state’s 100%-clean-by-2045 mandate. This is a category error. The RPS is a floor. It’s the minimum the state will eventually require. Irvine’s own ACHIEVES Resolution and CAAP commit the city to a faster timeline than that, which is the entire reason a city has its own climate plan. If the answer to every local question is “wait twenty years for Sacramento,” there’s no point in having a Sustainability Commission at all.

A final claim was that the report’s numbers are “way, way off.” No specific figure was named by Ms. Johnson. The numbers come from the 2024 Power Content Label, the 2019 greenhouse gas inventory, and EPA’s standard equivalency factors. Each is footnoted. Anyone who wants to examine them is welcome to.

The Inconsistency

Step back from the meeting itself for a minute. There’s a contradiction in the Mayor’s position that’s worth naming.

For years, he’s argued that OCPA’s clean-energy procurement is meaningless because, as he likes to put it, “you get the same electrons as your neighbor no matter what.” On the physics, at the wire, that’s true. Electrons don’t care which utility paid for them. But on the climate, it’s beside the point. Procurement decides what gets built and burned upstream of the wire, which is the entire question.

This week, the Mayor and his surrogates argued the opposite: that OCPA Basic Choice’s higher carbon intensity is a reason to leave for SCE.

You can’t have it both ways. If procurement doesn’t matter, OCPA’s carbon number is meaningless and not a reason to leave. If the number matters — and it does — then procurement matters, and the right move is to enroll Irvine in a cleaner OCPA tier, not abandon a public agency. You can’t hold both positions at the same time, unless you’re picking, meeting by meeting, the version that supports the conclusion you’ve already reached.

The Pattern

At Council on Tuesday, I described the Mayor’s pattern of behavior as a personal vendetta. Against Councilmember Treseder, against me, against others who have crossed him. Dr. Treseder, from her four years on the dais, named the broader institutional version of the same pattern, and her version reaches further than mine:

“The things that the mayor was saying about withdrawing from OC Fire Authority sounded very, very similar to the arguments for withdrawing from OCPA, just really emotional and more of an attack on the agency and the people in it than necessarily the policy merits. Same thing happened with the library. … For some reason, the mayor wants us to keep withdrawing from all these other agencies.”

OCPA. The Orange County Fire Authority. The Orange County library system, which Irvine has already left. Three different agencies, three different policy areas, three different fights, and by Dr. Treseder’s account, the same emotional posture each time.

Here’s a useful test for any policy argument: does the same set of facts, applied across unrelated cases, produce the same response? When the same arguments and the same affect show up in three different withdrawal fights, climate and fire and libraries, the operative variable isn’t the policy. It’s the impulse to withdraw.

It’s worth noting one thing about the report the Mayor objected to. Its introduction credits Irvine as the first city in the country to ban chlorofluorocarbons, in 1989, a measure widely credited with pushing the federal government, and eventually the world, toward implementation of the Montreal Protocol that has restored the ozone layer. The Irvine ordinance was led by Mayor Larry Agran. The report praises that leadership, by name. Thirty-seven years later, the same Larry Agran removed me from the commission for writing a scientific city climate action report that praised him. Both versions of Larry Agran are in the public record. They are hard to reconcile.

It’s worth thinking about what a city loses when withdrawal becomes its dominant theory of governance. Regional cooperation isn’t ideology. It’s how cities of Irvine’s size manage things they can’t do alone. Power procurement at meaningful scale. Fire response across jurisdictions. A library system that we are learning is a large challenge to create and manage on our own. Pulling out of these agreements, one at a time, doesn’t make Irvine more sovereign. It makes Irvine smaller.

After

A small note on timing, since it matters. On Monday evening, on the same day as my formal removal and the night before the Council vote, Councilmember William Go offered to reseat me on the Sustainability Commission. He made the offer before any of the Tuesday weather had cleared. By the time Council convened the next morning, I already had a path back. The deletion vote happened on Tuesday. Councilmember Go’s formal appointment came through on Wednesday, and his trust in me as a scientist to serve the public’s interest means a ton.

A small framing thought, before what comes next.

Irvine spends meaningful money every year cleaning up after itself. The Landscape, Lighting, and Park Maintenance District costs roughly $24 million a year to operate, and the City just absorbed a $4.6 million increase in landscape costs without controversy. We pay about $2.29 million a year, twice the national municipal average, to take care of the urban forest. We sweep arterials weekly and residential streets twice a month. We clean catch basins, pick up litter, trim medians, and remove graffiti within forty-eight hours. None of this is waste. It’s what a city does. We make a mess, and we clean it up.

Carbon is the same kind of mess. The natural gas burned in our buildings, the gasoline burned on our roads, the fossil generation upstream of our wires — all of it is waste, in the most literal sense, that we are producing and discharging into a shared atmosphere. The principle that says we clean up our streets is the same principle that says we should clean up our energy. There is no version of municipal responsibility in which the first obligation holds and the second one doesn’t. Climate work, at root, is just the City doing what it has always done in every other domain: not leaving its mess for someone else to handle, and not harming the Earth we share.

The report is now expected again to be presented to the Sustainability Commission at its May 13 meeting. That meeting, more than anything else that happened this week, is what matters. The work the Mayor tried to remove from the conversation by removing the person who wrote it is going to happen anyway. Same date. Same room. Same record.

The path forward isn’t complicated. Enroll the City’s accounts at a cleaner OCPA tier. Keep moving on the building electrification and clean-transportation goals already adopted in the CAAP. Honor the timeline in ACHIEVES. None of it requires anyone to leave anything.

The week wasn’t only Council chambers. The report circulated outside Irvine in the days after it came out: among environmental groups, among policy people, among the Bishop’s Commission on Climate Change of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, where Gloria Sefton brought it to people of faith working on climate. The response from that last group, in particular, has been a reminder that this work has stakes well beyond Council chambers.

There are people I owe thanks to.

To Councilmember William Go, first and most: for offering me the seat on Monday evening, before the Tuesday vote and before any of the political weather had cleared; for seconding the deletion motion the next day; and for making the appointment formal on Wednesday. Three distinct decisions across three days. Each of them mattered.

To Councilmembers Treseder, Mai, Martinez Franco, and Liu, for the deletion vote and for refusing to play along with the theater. To Councilmembers Liu, Treseder, and Martinez Franco specifically, who reached out directly with words of support on Saturday after the news of my removal circulated. To Councilmember Carroll, for personal kindness despite our procedural disagreement, and for keeping a door open on a future appointment. To Doug Elliott and Jeremy Ficarola, for taking the public mic. To Gloria Sefton, for circulating the report among the people of faith working on climate, whose response has reminded me that this work has stakes well beyond council chambers. And to Sustainability Commission staff, for providing the report to the Sustainability Commission on May 13, when it was expected.

A note on why I do this. I first ran for Irvine City Council in 2017. I lost. The reason I ran, then, was that a majority of our sitting council members were climate change deniers — not skeptics, not slow movers, deniers — and the gap between what the science said and what the City would even acknowledge had become impossible for me to watch as a physicist and a resident. I wrote about it at the time in Scientific American. The premise of running for office, as a scientist, was that someone should bring the actual evidence into the room.

Nine years later, the denialism is gone. No one on this council disputes the underlying science. That is real progress, and it is worth saying out loud. What replaced denial, though, is something subtler and in some ways harder to fight: a Council that has adopted ambitious climate commitments on paper, and a mayor who agendizes withdrawal from the agencies that would let us meet them, multiple times a year, and who removes the people who write reports pointing this out. The science is no longer the disputed thing. The institutions built to act on the science are. The disagreement has moved one layer up.

Climate work in any city is almost never the heroic version you read about. It’s mostly the discipline of doing the next correct thing in front of the next correct group of people, and refusing to let the noise pick the agenda. May 13 is the next correct thing. The work continues.

Video record

The full April 28, 2026 Irvine City Council meeting is available on the City’s video portal. The clips referenced in this post:

• Dr. Kathleen Treseder, on the recurrence of OCPA agenda items (“the 10th time”) — watch

• Dr. Kathleen Treseder, on the dynamic in the chamber (“theater of the absurd... we all know who Larry’s people are”) — watch

• Dr. Kathleen Treseder, on the unredacted power purchasing agreements (“none of the mayor’s staff ever looked at it”) — watch

• Doug Elliott (OCPA Community Advisory Committee), public comment on Item 5.5 deletion (“Groundhog Day... we’re not going to get to sustainability without OCPA”) — watch

• Doug Elliott, earlier public comment on commissioner removals (“a tragic loss for Irvine”) — watch

• Mike Carroll, from the dais (“I’d consider you for sustainability”) — watch

• Dr. Kev Abazajian, public comment ("the mayor's pattern is a personal vendetta") — watch

• Jeremy Ficarola, public comment (“asking this mayor to step down”) — watch

The full Climate Crisis Action Report (April 22, 2026) is available here, and the related Irvine Watchdog article is here.

Every spring quarter, on the first day of Physics 113A, Quantum Physics I at UC Irvine, I tell my students they are about to join a very small club

Roughly 100 students a year are taught quantum mechanics at UC Irvine. Maybe — optimistically — another 100 are taught at Chapman and CSU Fullerton combined. Over the past fifty years, that’s about 10,000 people in all of Orange County who have been formally taught the framework that describes the deepest known layer of reality. Out of a county of 3.2 million, that’s 0.3%.

Three out of every thousand people in OC have been taught what reality is actually made of.

I think that’s a problem.

Today, on May the 4th, I want to fix a tiny piece of it. Because the strange thing about the “true nature of reality” is that the conceptual core of it — once you strip away the calculus and the bra-ket notation — is something a journalism major with a part time job at Trader Joe’s can absolutely understand. I know, because I tried it.

The Trader Joe’s Cashier Who Asked Good Questions

Yesterday, I was checking out at Trader Joe’s, and the cashier, a thoughtful young man who told me he is a journalism major, asked what I do. I told him I’m a professor at UC Irvine, and he asked what I teach. (A pet peeve, since most of my time actually goes to research — but fair enough.) I told him quantum mechanics. He said, “Wait, so what is quantum mechanics, actually?”

He kept asking sharper and sharper questions while ringing up my groceries — from “what are your students learning?” to “what is Hilbert space?”

By the time I’d paid, I realized something: most popular explanations of quantum mechanics are bad. Not because the public can’t handle the ideas, but because physics discussion of quantum mechanics focuses on consequences, Schrödinger’s cat, the uncertainty principle, “spooky action at a distance,” instead of telling them what the theory says the world is.

So let me try, for him, and for you. And because today is May the 4th, a day to think about invisible things that bind the Universe together, let’s start there.

The Force Is Real. It’s Just Not What You Think.

In Star Wars, the Force is described as an energy field generated by all living things, something that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together. That’s fiction, but it’s pointing at something true.

There really is something that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the Universe together. Physicists have a name for it. We can call it the wave function, but that’s a concept really just scratches the surface of the fundamental physics.

In modern physics, specifically, in the framework called quantum field theory that underlies the Standard Model of particle physics: the world is not, at bottom, made of particles. It is made of fields. An electron is not a tiny ball; it is a localized ripple in the electron field, a field that fills all of space. A photon is a ripple in the electromagnetic field. A quark is a ripple in a quark field. The Higgs boson is a ripple in the Higgs field. There is a field for every kind of particle in nature, and these fields are everywhere, all the time… even in the emptiest vacuum, the fields are still there, quietly humming with quantum activity.

What physicists call the wave function is the quantum state of any of those fields. It is the single mathematical object that captures what any field everywhere is doing, and their entanglement describes how all those activities are correlated with one another. Extrapolating, the collection of wave functions isn’t the state of one electron. It is the state of everything.

And the place where these wave function live, the actual stage on which the entire Universe plays out, is called Hilbert space.

This is where things get interesting.

What Is Hilbert Space?

Forget physics for a second and think about music.

A musical chord can be described in two completely different ways. You can describe the waveform, the wiggling of air pressure over time. Or you can describe the spectrum (in frequency space) which notes are in the chord, and how loudly each one is played. The chord is the same thing either way; you’ve just chosen a different list of “directions” to describe it in.

A Hilbert space is, roughly, a list of all the possible “directions” a physical system can point in. Not directions in the up/down/left/right sense, directions in an abstract space of possibilities. Each possible state of the system is a single arrow, a vector, pointing somewhere in this space.

For a single electron, the Hilbert space already has infinitely many directions, one for each thing the electron could possibly be doing. For the whole Universe, the Hilbert space is unimaginably vast. But it is still just a space of possibilities, and the actual state of the Universe is one specific arrow pointing through it.

A collection of arrows, the wave functions of everything, is what’s real. It evolves smoothly in time, governed by an equation called the Schrödinger equation, which is essentially the law of cause and effect at the quantum level.

The picture at the top of this post is the slide I showed my students in their last lecture. It illustrates the simplest case: a single particle, say, one electron. The big yellow arrow is the particle’s wave function. The little label next to it, |Ψ(t)⟩, is just physicist shorthand for “the state of the particle at time t.” It turns out that time is always special and not just a property of projection, in this picture. The small fan of arrows labeled “n-dimensions” represents one possible coordinate system inside that particle’s Hilbert space: one specific set of “directions” you could lay down in order to describe what the big arrow is doing.

The line written underneath is the lesson I most wanted my students to leave with: the vector lives outside of any given coordinate system. The wave function is what’s real. The coordinate system you use to describe it is your choice, and that choice is the whole story behind what comes next.

Position Is a Choice, Not a Fact

When you ask “where is the electron?”, you are asking the wave function to express itself in a particular basis: the position basis. You are demanding that it tell you, for every point in 3D space, how much of itself is “there.”

But you could just as easily ask “how fast is it moving?” That’s the momentum basis. Or “how much energy does it have?” That’s the energy basis. Or “which way is its spin pointing?” That’s the spin basis. There are infinitely many equally valid questions.

These are all the same wave function. They are just different shadows of the same arrow, projected onto different walls.

The position description feels like the real one to us because we evolved with eyes and hands operating in a 3D world. But mathematically, position is no more fundamental than momentum or energy or spin. It’s just one shadow among many.

This is the moment when, in lecture, students start to look uncomfortable. Because if position is just one of many equally valid descriptions of the wave function, then what does it really mean to say a particle is “somewhere”?

Hilbert Space Fundamentalism

A growing community of physicists, including Sean Carroll at Johns Hopkins, and building on earlier work by Mark Van Raamsdonk, Brian Swingle, and others who study black holes and holography, has been pushing this question to its limit. The proposal, sometimes called Hilbert Space Fundamentalism, is breathtakingly simple:

The wave function in Hilbert space is all there is. Three-dimensional space is not fundamental. It emerges.

On this view, the Universe is fundamentally an arrow evolving through an abstract mathematical space. There is no underlying 3D grid sitting underneath everything. The feeling of three dimensions, the existence of distinct objects at distinct locations, the very notion of “here” and “there”… all of it is a pattern that emerges from how different parts of particle wave functions are entangled with each other.

Bits of the wave functions that are heavily entangled appear “near” each other. Bits that are weakly entangled appear “far apart.” Space itself is woven out of quantum entanglement.

If this is right, and there are very good reasons from the boundary of gravitational physics and quantum physics to think it might be, then the room you are sitting in, the screen you are reading this on, the distance between your hand and your face, are not fundamental features of the world. They are emergent — which is a very different thing from being unreal. Emergent things are entirely real: a hot stove is still hot, even though “heat” is really just the motion of atoms.

The mechanism that turns the abstract wave function into the solid, classical, three-dimensional world you actually experience has a name: decoherence. When a large object interacts with its surroundings, every photon and air molecule brushing against it, most of the abstract possibilities in Hilbert space get suppressed almost instantaneously, and a small set of stable, classical-looking descriptions takes over. For macroscopic things, the description that survives is the one in which objects have definite positions.

So at the level of a single electron, position really is just one basis among many. But at the level of your coffee cup, the rest of the Universe has effectively forced the position basis on us. The cup is real. The room is real. They are what the underlying wave functions, the more fundamental structures beneath the classical world, look like after decoherence, in the basis decoherence has picked out.

The Force, in other words, is not a metaphor. There really is a set of mathematical objects that surround us, penetrate us, and bind the galaxy together. We are patterns inside them.

Welcome to the 0.3%

If you got this far, here is what you now know that almost no one in Orange County has ever been told:

The fundamental object in the Universe is not a particle and not a field. It is a wave function — an arrow in an abstract space of possibilities called Hilbert space. The position of things in 3D space is just one of many equally valid ways of describing that arrow; there is nothing special about it from the wave function’s point of view. And, it seems, 3D space itself is not fundamental at all. It may emerge from the entanglement structure of the universal set of wave functions.

You didn’t need the math. You needed someone to actually tell you what the theory says.

So: welcome. You’re in the 0.3% now. You know what the world is made of, as far as our best physics can currently tell.

May the 4th be with you.

—

Note: if you want to explore further, check out Sean Carroll’s “Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space” essay or his book Something Deeply Hidden for further reading.

It isn’t. PDFs generated by LaTeX, Markdown, or Keynote are typically invisible to screen readers. They lack the document structure (tags, reading order, alt text, title metadata) that federal law and university policy now require. When I ran my files through our campus accessibility checker, almost all of them failed.

Campus IT doesn’t provide a tool for this. I went looking for one and couldn’t find anything faculty-facing and practical. So I built a workflow using AI, and I’m sharing it here.

What’s actually wrong with the PDFs we generate

The issue is both the content and its the structure. A PDF from LaTeX or Keynote is a garbled mess of a document from a screen reader’s perspective. It’s missing:

• A tagged structure tree — the scaffold that lets screen readers navigate headings, paragraphs, and figures

• Alternative text for images and equations — including plots, diagrams, and sketches

• A declared reading order — so multi-column layouts aren’t read as gibberish

• Document title metadata — a field campus checkers explicitly verify

• A language declaration — required for assistive technology to interpret text correctly

The AI workflow remediates all of these automatically, including using vision AI to generate meaningful alt text for figures and equations.

Two ways to run it

Paid AI service

Simpler — runs within AI app

Works with Claude Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro, ChatGPT Pro, or any AI with code execution. No software to install—the model runs Python for you.

Instructions →

Free AI service

Free — needs command line

Requires installing pikepdf via the command line, plus a few extra steps. This is what I use day-to-day, even with a paid subscription.

Instructions →

Does it actually work?

I’ve tested the output three ways: manual inspection of the PDF structure, asking the AI model to verify the accessibility properties, and running files through UC Irvine’s online campus accessibility checker. All tests pass.

But, see the disclaimer below. I can’t speak to every document type or every version of every tool. But for LaTeX problem sets and Keynote lecture slides, which make up the bulk of my course materials, this workflow has handled them reliably.

Why isn’t campus IT doing this?

That’s a fair question, and I don’t have a satisfying answer. The tooling exists. The need is obvious. Accessible course materials aren’t optional. They’re required. But in the meantime, this works.

If you try it, I’d genuinely like to hear how it goes, especially if you hit edge cases or find improvements.

Disclaimer

These tools are not guaranteed to produce fully compliant PDFs. Results vary by document and AI model. Always verify output using your institution’s official accessibility checker, and consult your campus disability services or IT accessibility office as needed.

The University of California, long a beacon of public higher education and research excellence, has taken a wholehearted leap to submission to the authority of the Trump administration. The UC Office of the President (UCOP) has mandated the installation of Trellix Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) software on faculty computers. This step undermines the very foundation of academic freedom, privacy, and shared governance.

A Dangerous Precedent

Trellix EDR is not a basic form of security software. It grants itself unrestricted, root-level access to faculty computers, scanning all files, logging metadata, quarantining material, and even uploading content deemed “suspicious”—all without user consent. This level of surveillance is unprecedented in UC’s history and represents an existential threat to the independence of research and teaching.

Faculty across the UC system have been clear: this is not acceptable. On June 12, 2025, the systemwide Academic Senate passed a resolution by an overwhelming 82% supermajority demanding an immediate halt to the implementation of Trellix. Earlier, faculty senates at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Riverside expressed similar objections through letters and resolutions. The Council of UC Faculty Associations sent a letter to former President Drake requesting, among other items, for these cybersecurity changes be subject to a process of approval in accordance with AAUP’s recommendations regarding Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications, and for Academic Senate to be recognized as the decision making authority on this academic matter. Over 1,000 faculty signed a petition opposing the rollout, and 633 faculty members, including leaders from multiple campuses, sent a direct letter to incoming UC President James Milliken urging him to stop the program, as he was newly incoming as of August 1.

Yet UCOP has pressed forward.

Handing the Keys to Washington

The danger extends well beyond UC administrators or Trellix employees peering into faculty work. Trellix participates in the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC), a federal task force that includes the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). By design, JCDC facilitates “rapid bilateral and multilateral threat information sharing” between private companies and the federal government.

In practical terms, this means that sensitive faculty data—including unfinished manuscripts, confidential peer reviews, private communications, politically sensitive analyses, or health data covered by privacy protections—could be shared with federal agencies, without a warrant. In an era where federal investigative and prosecutorial powers are increasingly used against its perceived political opponents, this creates a chilling risk: UC faculty could find their research or communications weaponized by the Trump administration.

The precedent is alarming. Trellix’s predecessor, FireEye, was hacked in the 2020 SolarWinds cyberattack, which compromised more than 250 federal agencies. Centralizing vast troves of UC’s intellectual life under one vulnerable surveillance system invites disaster.

Silence from the Administration

Faculty have not been silent. In a letter to UCOP in August, I and hundreds of colleagues asked for an update from the incoming UC President James Milliken on UC’s response to the June Academic Senate resolution demanding a halt to the mandated implementation of Trellix or similarly invasive software. The letter underscored that this mandate puts the full scope of faculty work under the potential scrutiny of IT staff, corporate contractors, and—most significantly—federal law enforcement. In the only response the faculty received, the current Chair of the systemwide Academic Senate, Ahmet Palazoglu, has told the hundreds of faculty signing on to the letter that President Milliken will not be responding to it. Chair Palazoglu also indicated he himself will take no steps to halt coerced implementation of the software, though his own body, the Senate, has overwhelmingly directed the halt through its resolution in June. UC’s and the Academic Senate Chair’s refusal to respect the Senate’s resolution is a violation of shared governance; and, more importantly, it is an existential threat to academic freedom.

The administration’s silence is deafening. Despite overwhelming faculty opposition, UCOP has continued expanding Trellix’s role, with UC Irvine and other campuses tying access to core systems—such as Canvas, reimbursements, and timesheet submissions—to installation of the software. Faculty are being coerced into handing over their intellectual lives to a system they did not choose, and which their Academic Senate representatives explicitly rejected.

What’s at Stake

America has become the beacon of a thriving, free, open society due, in large part, to the vibrant academic environment at its flagship universities like the University of California. At stake is whether the University of California will remain a place where independent thought thrives—or whether it will become an extension of federal surveillance infrastructure, handing over faculty research and communication to agencies that may, under an increasingly authoritarian government, weaponize that access.

Faculty at UC produce Nobel Prize-winning science, cutting-edge technological innovation, sensitive health research, and politically consequential analyses. These works must be shielded from intrusion—not handed over to intrusive IT, and especially not to the increasingly authoritarian Trump administration. In a time that Title VI prosecutions are weaponized by the federal government against its perceived political opponents in higher education, this unfettered access to faculty computers is incredibly alarming.

The Academic Senate has spoken. The faculty have spoken. UCOP must listen and stop this mandate. Interestingly this mandate does not apply to graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and lecturers, who are part of collective bargaining unions that have the power to protect its members, a power the Academic Senate does not have. This begs the question if UC faculty should unionize. By not listening to the clear direction of faculty, UC administration abdicates its responsibility to protect academic freedom, the privacy of its scholars, and the integrity of the institution itself.

Resources

• Workarounds of the blocks to IT services from computers without Trellix EDR

• How to remove Trellix EDR from Windows systems if it was installed without user consent

SoCalGas and UC Irvine are proposing a $27 million dollar dangerous demonstration project on UC Irvine’s campus to test blending up to 20% hydrogen into existing natural gas heating infrastructure.

This boondoggle project is fundamentally flawed because it rests on the false premise that hydrogen can serve as a practical replacement for natural gas in residential and commercial heating. In reality, hydrogen is an inherently inefficient heating fuel that is drastically inferior to modern electric heat pump technology by a factor of over three in energy efficiency.

Let’s break down the essential issues around energy for heating and energy efficiency: Heating applications that use natural gas in homes, businesses, and university campuses can achieve a factor of 3 or more in energy efficiency in heating by using electric heat pump technology. Heat pumps are an existing and reliable technology being implemented everywhere, including right here in California.

How does this work? Because of their thermodynamic engine properties, electric heat pumps achieve a coefficient of performance (COP) of 3 or more. This means they can provide three units of heat energy for every unit of electrical energy consumed. That’s the thermodynamic magic of a heat pump. Burning hydrogen, by stark contrast, delivers heat at a COP of less than 1, making it over three times less efficient than heat pumps.

Because of this inefficiency, there is no credible future where hydrogen is used wide-scale for heating in residences, businesses, and university campuses.

Besides this energy inefficiency, the vast majority of hydrogen today is produced from fossil fuels via methane gas reforming, which releases carbon dioxide at a rate per unit energy that is worse than burning the natural gas directly. Pursuing hydrogen blending is thus a step backward, not forward, for sustainability even when compared to the awful, outdated ongoing use of fossil natural gas.

Moreover, even if the hydrogen is produced from clean, renewable energy like solar-produced electricity, one still loses a factor of three in COP, therefore using more than 3 times the energy in heating via hydrogen burning than by using the same solar-produced electricity in a heat pump! To reiterate, even burning renewably produced hydrogen is a factor of 3 worse choice — in energy efficiency and cost — than proven heat-pump technologies. So, this talk of a “clean hydrogen future” has nothing to do with the kinds of heating applications needed on our campus or any home or business.

Beyond gross inefficiency, hydrogen introduces significant risks to infrastructure and public safety. Its small molecular size leads to increased leakage and raises the likelihood of pipeline failure due to embrittlement of metals. Hydrogen also has a lower ignition point and higher flammability range, making leaks particularly dangerous in residential or university settings. Indeed, the American Medical Association has specifically warned that hydrogen-methane blends increase emissions of harmful nitrogen oxides, exacerbating health risks such as asthma.

Also very troublingly, this project diverts precious ratepayer funds into an effort that primarily benefits fossil fuel interests intent on prolonging the use of existing gas infrastructure. Natural gas needs to go the way of whale oil as an energy source — become history. The project represents a classic boondoggle “bridge to nowhere,” a costly distraction from the urgent electrification needed to achieve California’s climate and clean-air objectives.

The bottom line is clear: hydrogen blending for heating makes no logical or practical sense. It is inefficient, unsafe, and unsustainable. This is why both the Associated Students of UC Irvine (the undergraduate student government) and the Graduate Students Association (the graduate student government) have both passed strong resolutions opposing this project in this past academic year.

Rather than wasting resources on a fundamentally flawed technology, our state’s and campus’s priority should be accelerating the transition to renewable-powered electrification. UC Irvine and the CPUC should reject this misguided demonstration project and focus instead on proven, efficient, and truly sustainable heating solutions.

Action item: Use this link to place your own comment to the CPUC here regarding this wasteful, dangerous experiment.

Addendum: over on the UCI channel on reddit, I shared my comments to the in-person hearing, and heard back from an anonymous user who referred to SoCalGas as “We” — therefore it may be that they are speaking on behalf of the company. They said things along the lines that “hydrogen is never meant to be a replacement for natural gas” and that it is an “bridge technology.” Clearly, they acknowledge that this is a bridge to nowhere project. The claim that this is a decarbonization step is another fallacy: large-scale green hydrogen does not exist, nor is it expected to exist in any large scale form that can be included into natural gas systems. Hydrogen that does exist is from natural gas and actually is more carbon intensive than the primary natural gas. We should be electrifying everything, and shutting off natural gas rather than finding more things to burn.

In recent years, we have witnessed a profound disruption of the rule of law, both internationally and domestically. The Trump administration ignores responsibilities outlined in the U.S. Constitution and federal laws enacted by Congress. Discussions of America’s responsibilities under international law are virtually absent from mainstream media and social media. With the U.S. President’s attack on Iran, the dialogue has narrowly focused on short-term strategic benefits and risks, sidelining legal and moral considerations. While there is some congressional objection regarding domestic authority for the strike, the absence of debate on international legal authority is striking. This contrasts with previous discussions, such as those before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where the U.S.’s international obligations were at least minimally acknowledged. Today, those obligations are essentially disregarded. The U.S. has become a rogue state, and the media environment and its Overton Window fail to address this reality.

At the highest level of American governance, a disturbing pattern of self-serving corruption and disregard for the rule of law has emerged. The President assembled a mob on January 6, 2021, attempting to halt the peaceful transfer of power, and explicitly called for suspending the U.S. Constitution. He is also a convicted felon for covering up payments related to extramarital affairs and has been found liable for sexual assault. Such criminality is rarely discussed, highlighting a broad, systemic erosion of accountability.

Federally, the violations are profound and numerous. Instances of ignoring the faithful execution of laws abound, leaving critical federal programs unfunded or dismantled, including USAID, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Education. California and other states have been compelled to sue the federal government repeatedly to challenge illegal actions, starting with a directive at the beginning of the President’s term that froze $3 trillion in federal funding—a clear violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. Furthermore, fundamental human rights have been undermined through anonymous abductions and deportations by the Department of Homeland Security, often without due process and even targeting innocent individuals residing legally in the U.S.

Historically, after World War Two, global consensus aimed to protect national sovereignty, prevent genocide, uphold human rights, and protect indigenous peoples. During the Cold War, the U.S. rationalized international law violations as necessary to combat totalitarian communism. However, post-Cold War actions, specifically the invasion of Iraq, flagrantly violated the UN Charter. As a result, America’s moral and legal authority to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is severely diminished.

This moral and legal vacuum has resulted in a disturbing acceptance of humanity’s worst crimes, including genocide. The Rwandan Genocide in 1994 received significant international attention, leading former President Clinton to describe his greatest regret as failing to intervene. The genocide in Darfur (2003-2006) similarly gained substantial attention, with the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicting several, including Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, in 2009.

Today, international inaction prevails despite seven ongoing genocides—against the Rohingya in Burma, Masalit in Sudan, Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Ukrainians in territories occupied by Russia, Israeli Jews by Hamas, Palestinians by the State of Israel, and Armenians in Artsakh and Armenia by Azerbaijan—aided by Turkey. In contradiction to having international accountability for these crimes, the U.S. has been attacking the ICC for its attempt at prosecuting some of these crimes, using its international financial and technological dominance to do so.

Ultimately, the erosion of international and federal adherence to law—backed by moral causes—has created a vacuum where no moral compass guides national or individual identity. In this environment, power alone dictates actions, eroding ethical accountability and human dignity. As Americans and global citizens, we must recognize this crisis and call for collective action to restore justice, accountability, and humanity. The alternative—a descent into lawlessness and brutality at home and abroad—is terrifyingly bleak.

Addendum:

On a personal level, American society seems to be increasingly tolerating dishonesty. In academia, I have witnessed a significant rise in academic dishonesty, even in upper-division physics courses—a trend unimaginable nearly two decades ago. Similarly, scientific dishonesty among researchers, even at prestigious institutions, has markedly increased throughout my 24-year career since earning my PhD.

The words we use about the past shape the future. When leaders deny genocide, they invite it to continue.

Here we are — today — at 110 years since the widely recognized start of the Armenian Genocide, and it is more clear than ever that the Armenian cause is not just about a single people’s history—it is about the future of humanity.

We Armenians were the first to suffer the full force of industrialized, identity-based violence in the modern era. The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923 was a systematic attempt to erase a people, carried out with technological and bureaucratic precision. That model—combining nationalism, propaganda, and state machinery—became the template for horrors that followed: the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, and more.

In response, the world said, “Never again.” The United Nations was born out of that promise. So was the Genocide Convention. We collectively agreed that identity-based annihilation was a threat to global peace and could not be tolerated again.

But here we are, in 2025, watching the resurgence of such genocidal violence across the globe.

Armenians in Artsakh have been killed and forcibly displaced in what is truly the continuation of the Armenian Genocide that started in the late nineteenth century. Ukrainians continue to resist a brutal invasion aimed at erasing their national identity. Palestinians and Israelis face genocidal devastation in a cycle of conflict where civilian lives are devalued. Uyghurs in China are interned and repressed on a massive scale. The Rohingya remain stateless and under siege. The Masalit in Sudan’s Darfur region are once again targets of mass violence. We are seeing a world where all the great powers are directly participating in genocide or complicit in it.

And now, President Donald Trump has doubled down on his denial of the Armenian Genocide—a crime against history and humanity. His words embolden regimes around the world to do the same, and worse, continue the worst crimes against humanity.

Genocide denial is a revisionist history—and a signal—a green light for others to erase, to suppress, to kill. It undermines international law, violates the spirit of the UN Genocide Convention, and betrays the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirms the right of all peoples to survive, to thrive, and to be free from erasure. We appear to be entering a period in unfolding world history where might makes right, and identity-hatred based nationalistic violence can spiral into global conflict at a time when the most destructive tools of war are available: nuclear weapons.

The denial of genocide—especially by the U.S. president—is a profound threat to peace. It says that crimes against humanity are negotiable, deniable, expendable. That memory can be manipulated and justice discarded.

We cannot let that stand.

Here in Orange County, we have tried to respond not with silence, but with action. After the former Mayor of Irvine praised the genocidal state of Azerbaijan, participated in anti-Armenian hate speech and promoted genocide deniers, we didn’t just protest—we organized. We hosted a screening of the documentary Motherland in Irvine City Hall, where three Councilmembers stood with us. We have worked with the City through five stages of approval to move forward with the creation of Orange County’s first public Armenian Genocide memorial at the Great Park.

But the challenges persist. Just last October, the City of Irvine invited Azerbaijani state officials to the Global Village Festival—a year after Azerbaijan’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Artsakh. I confronted their Vice-Consul and demanded he dissociate himself from the genocidal actions of his government. He responded with cold denial and deflection. When this encounter was exposed online, it drew the attention it deserved—but also revealed how far we still have to go.

Still, there is progress. The former mayor who promoted anti-Armenian rhetoric is gone. New Irvine Mayor Larry Agran has pledged $1,000 to support the Genocide memorial. Other councilmembers—James Mai, William Go, Melinda Liu, Michael Carroll, and Kathleen Treseder—have voiced support as well. That’s the power of sustained local action.

Because the truth is, justice is not an abstract concept. It’s built in our cities, in our neighborhoods, by people who show up, speak out, and refuse to forget.

Being Armenian American means living with complexity. We are survivors of genocide and citizens of a nation that, at times, enables new atrocities. That contradiction can paralyze us—or it can call us to act.

And the best way to act is to be excellent at what we do. In our professions, our communities, our politics—we gain leverage when we lead, when we build, when we speak with moral clarity.

We must push back against the normalization of denial. We must hold our leaders accountable, whether they sit in Irvine City Hall or the White House. And we must defend the principle that every people, everywhere, have the right to exist in dignity and peace.

The Armenian cause is the human cause. And in fighting for it, we fight for a world where genocide is not just remembered—but halted and prevented.

Here’s the dirty little secret: the probability of winning is itself an estimate, and it carries its own margin of error. These models report a single percentage for each candidate’s likelihood of winning, yet behind that number lies a broad range of possibilities that vary from simulation to simulation.

Source of Errors: Statistical and Systematic

The well-understood error on any measurement is its statistical error, and pollsters know this. They provide the “margin-of-error” on their poll outcomes, which reflects the statistical error of the sample. The error is inferred from simple counting error, and exists in any measurement that uses discrete counts, as polls do.  

Then, there’s what in physics is called systematic error, meaning that something could be off in your measurement due to the techniques you are using to measure it, like your tool, or that there is an unknown contaminant in the data that skews your error. A simple example of this is measuring something with a ruler. Below, I measured my son’s toy car, and I didn’t properly set the end of the car at the zero of the ruler, so it has what’s called a “zero point” error: I’ve systematically measured it wrong and everything wrong that I would measure in this method, by underestimating its length. I did this by setting the end of the object at the end of the ruler, and not the zero of the measurement marks. 

Pollsters are also making this kind of error. It is not intentional, at least, if they’re being proper, unbiased scientists about it. That is, the pollsters effectively don’t know where the “zero point” of their measurement is. They have to estimate it. That is, they have to figure out who is going to vote, and how they are going to vote. As an external observer of the outcomes of the pollsters’ measurements, one gets an estimate of the scale of the systematic error by comparing their results. Note that the pollsters are trying to sample the population in a way that reflects who is going to vote, and how. That includes a model called the voter-turnout model. So, let’s compare two highly-rated pollster’s outcomes for likely voters in Michigan, which is a known critical swing state, from about the same polling time window. Quinnipiac Strategies has Harris up by 4%, and AtlasIntel has Trump up by 3%. That, obviously, is a 7 point difference, which . (They have 538 ratings of 2.8 and 2.7 out of 3, respectively, so very highly rated in methodologies.) One can go through a detailed calculation of t-tests or such to derive the probability of these results actually coming from the same population, but whether it’s 5% or much less than 1% doesn’t matter. They very likely aren’t sampling the same population, and the pollsters will tell you as much: their likely voter models are different. That’s because they all are making at least somewhat if not greatly different models of who will vote. 

These different voter models introduce a systematic error, because they make different decisions about who will be voting. How does one take into account systematic error? One method is to average the outcomes of the different pollsters and attribute a new random error associated with how they make their models. This mapping of a systematic offset into a random error relies on the assumption that the likely voter model selection will go to favor one candidate over the other at the same rate as vice-versa. That is, the average of the models’ assumptions is better than any given model. This is likely true in the limit of a large number of models with a wide variety of reasonable choices for models. However, the realm of the unknown unknowns kicks in, where pollsters all make a set of assumptions that give an overwhelming single-sided nature to the systematic errors introduced. After all, both the 2016 and 2020 presidential election polls were overall biased toward the Democratic candidate. There’s discussion that this could be over-corrected in 2024 polls. Overall, the treatment of systematic errors as statistical errors is problematic because these kinds of errors, like the zero point error on the car measurement above, can go more one way than the other. (In more technical terms, systematic errors do not need to follow the central-limit theorem and be normally distributed.)

Nevertheless, the systematic errors are handled as added uncertainty in the prediction platform’s simulations, increasing the overall uncertainty in the election outcome. 

The Secret: Overwhelmingly Large Uncertainty in the Outcome

Once the prediction models include an impressive amount of data, their uncertainties, and their covariances (the fact that errors are correlated), they get three numbers: the probability that Harris wins, that Trump wins, or that the electoral college is evenly split at 269-269, leaving the outcome to the House of Representatives. The last case is extremely unlikely in the models, at less than a 1% chance. 

There has been much consternation and panic as the predictions over at 538 and Nate Silver’s blog have gotten to favor Trump over Harris at a level of about 53% to 47%. What is hiding in this, in effect, one number of your favored candidate to win is the uncertainties involved. One could ask: how well do we know that Harris is expected to win at 47%, or even more quantitatively, what is the prediction for Harris’ number of the 538 Electoral College votes? 

The striking answer is that the uncertainty on the predictions of the Electoral College outcome is enormous. The predictions’ do not provide the standard error (or standard deviation). However, they do provide the range of 95% or 80% of their simulations, for 538, and Nate Silver, respectively. One can then infer the standard error, under the assumption that the distributions are normal (Gaussian). We’re doing this to get at the uncertainty of the prediction. In their most recent forecasts, 538’s standard error for the Electoral College vote is 74, and Silver’s is 46. The fact that Silver’s is smaller is why his has been more sensitive to polling shifts than the 538 model. Things have not changed much in the scale of the uncertainty in the past 8 years. In 2016, the 538 model had a standard error of 57 Electoral College votes.

So, to put it in more specific terms, the 538 forecast today for the Electoral College Vote for Harris is 261±74, or a standard error of 28% on the outcome. For Silver, it’s 269±46, or a 17% error. The standard error in a normal distribution only encompasses about two-thirds of outcomes (68.3% to be exact).  To put into perspective, this means that there is a one out of three chance that Harris gets either more than 331 Electoral College votes or fewer than 187 Electoral College votes. Or, again, two thirds of the outcomes are that Harris gets between 331 and 187 Electoral College votes, with the remainder of the outcomes outside of that range. Silver’s forecast is a little better in its uncertainty, with a standard-error forecast of between 315 and 223 Electoral College votes. 

It goes without saying that a prediction of between 331 and 187 Electoral College votes is not very good, especially when about one third of outcomes will even be outside of this range. See the plot above. If a scientist were to say that there is a significant difference between the measurements of the two points, you would be right to be incredulous.

So, while it is interesting to see how one can try and do a forecast of the outcome, the best models out there are actually not that predictive. And, it’s not like the predictors’ are being dishonest. Both 538 and Silver regularly state that there is a large uncertainty in their predictions, and to not worry about the differences between a 47% win probability and a 53% win probability. However, the scale of the predictions’ uncertainties is truly enormous, and the prediction models’ uncertainties are only shared in one place: their Electoral College vote prediction uncertainties. 
All this is to say, in a not so succinct way: the prediction process is interesting and worthy. But, do not worry about the predictions. They have intrinsic limitations. Go out and work to get out the vote, helping your candidate win, and don’t fret about the electoral oracles. 

—

Technical note: In talking about the standard deviation of the predictions, I am making the assumption that the distribution is normal or Gaussian. One can see the shape of the 538 and Silver distributions, and they are not Guassian. I’ve adopted that language to more easily give sense of the scale of the uncertainties to those familiar with normal (Gaussian) distributions. 

I am very disappointed in our University leadership’s actions yesterday. There was no justifiable reason presented to arrest peaceful protesters and violently dismantle their encampment. Despite the Chancellor's claim that he followed the policies of the Robinson-Edley Report, which require “[exhausting] all possible alternatives before resorting to police intervention,” all possible alternatives were not exhausted.

Reports from local news agencies stated that the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall (PSLH) was empty before the police moved into the Plaza. Ensuring PSLH was secure and usable for instruction could have been handled by the numerous security personnel present at UCI, potentially with police support if they met resistance. Instead, the response was disproportionate and unjust.

The Chancellor should have been removed earlier for several reasons: naming the School of Medicine after homeopaths in 2017, claiming “truth doesn't exist” at the April 25, 2018, forum with former School of Law Dean Richardson, appearing on a panel with Deepak Chopra on January 9, 2020, discussing “the case against reality,” and confessing ignorance in February of this year of the decades-long severe under-staffing for undergraduate instruction in Physical Sciences at a forum with the School of Physical Sciences faculty. Chancellor Gillman has to go now. He has made too many spectacular mistakes. The latest, using violent force on peaceful protestors, is beyond unacceptable.

Update with respect to the Chancellor and Provost response on May 24 to Faculty Senate Questions:

The response to Faculty Senate questions by Chancellor Howard Gillman and Provost Hal Stern further demonstrates that campus and police actions were overwhelmingly disproportionate and improper. Their response states that, near the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall, one individual physically prevented the movement of an officer, and another individual “charged at” an officer with a pallet (pages 12-13 in numbering and pages 19-20 in the response pdf file). These actions, in the view of campus leadership, justified the mutual aid call and declaration of an unlawful assembly of the entire encampment, resulting in hundreds of police assembling, using batons on protestors, tackling them, and arresting them.  The report clearly states that it’s only in these “subsequent confrontations” when police batonned and tackled protesters to be when officers were injured.

The use of an overwhelmingly disproportionate, violent response by police on hundreds of peaceful protesters due to the stated actions of two individuals is completely inappropriate and unacceptable. The fact that our campus leadership feels that this explanation is appropriate to justify the overwhelmingly disproportionate and violent police action indicates that both the Chancellor and Provost are unfit to serve our campus population.

In addition, the report by the Chancellor and Provost implies that the nature of the demands of the protestors justified the police response. I can think of nothing more egregious of an implication in a free and democratic society.

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

— UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

We are seeing today the unfolding of the latest violent episode in the continuing Armenian Genocide. I am not stating that this is a new genocide. Rather, it is the continuation of what started over 100 years ago, and has gone on since.

What started as the slaughter of an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians in the so-called “Hamidian Massacres” in 1894-97 evolved into a crescendo of atrocities with the arrest and execution of Armenian community leaders, academics, and intellectuals on April 24, 1915. The subsequent eight years saw the annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. The genocidal massacres lasted until 1923, which are generally regarded as the temporal scope of the Armenian Genocide.

The extent is truly much longer. Not only did the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Armenian population from its ancestral homelands start — as mentioned — in the late 19th century, it continued for more than the past 100 years through:

• denial that continues to this day;

• anti-Armenian subjugation;

• cultural genocide from 1915 through the intervening decades, removing Armenian cultural and religious sites in territory controlled by the oppressors;

• continued massive violence and elimination.

Indigenous Armenians

I would first like to highlight the extent of the Armenian population in Asia minor into the Armenian highlands as of 1896, drawn in a map by Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, a German geographic magazine of the 19th century.

Another more modern-style map is published in Robert H. Hewsen’s Armenia, A Historical Atlas, but is confined to only Asia Minor, which is the area of modern day Turkey. The map above includes the area controlled by the Russian Empire at the time, but not far western Asia Minor, nor all of Artsakh.

With these maps, I want to impart the extent of the Armenian people across their ancestral lands. The early history is as follows: Armenians are known to arise in the 6th century BC from a blending of Indo-Europeans with the Urartu people of the area, who were present since the 13th century BC. The 6th century BC is when the concept of “Armenian” or “Armen’s” arose. However, the genealogy as measured by DNA connects modern Armenians to the ancient Urartians. In a scholarly paper released in 2017, researchers conducted a comprehensive analysis of the mitochondrial genomes from four ancient skeletons originating from Urartu. This was performed in conjunction with the analysis of genomic data of other ancient populations located in what is now modern-day Armenia and Artsakh, covering a time span of 7,800 years. The study concluded that contemporary Armenians exhibit the smallest genetic divergence from these ancient skeletons.

Hamidian Massacres

In the late 19th Century, the Ottoman Empire was in decline. The Hamidian massacres are well documented and are seen as arising from the circumstances around Ottoman Empire’s weakening, with Ottoman-controlled areas in Europe having European powers and internal organizations insist upon self-determination for the Balkans. In these circumstances, the Ottoman Armenian population—continually treated as second-class citizens in the Ottoman Empire—asked for better treatment and even sent a delegation to the 1878 Congress of Berlin to lobby the European states to include protections of the rights of the rights of Ottoman Armenians as part of the Russo-Turkic War peace agreement. Those protections were never enforced, but led to further repression. At about that time, the Sultan gave status to irregular forces called the Hamidiye regiments. The Hamidiye irregulars were largely responsible for the Hamidian genocidal massacres, with killing of civilians starting as early as 1892-3. The 1894-1897 massacres were largely in Constantinople, as well as the smaller villages of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzurum, Mamuret-ul-Aziz, Sivas, Trebizond and Van. The massacres subsided in 1896 when news finally arrived to external powers that condemned the Sultan’s massacres.

Events of Genocide in 1915-1923

The Armenian Genocide is widely regarded as confined to the period of 1915-1923, and sometimes even less. I will not elaborate extensively on this interval, as the motivations and execution of the genocide in this duration have already been well-documented and discussed in detail. If you would like to learn more about this time, I recommend my own quick primer on Substack, and references therein, and I copy some of the references here:

• There is a good 3 1/2 minute YouTube history crash course here. It uses stick figure animations, so it feels a bit inappropriate for the topic of genocide. But, they probably are a frugal YouTube channel; 

• The online Armenian Genocide Museum of America is excellent;

• The LA Times had significant coverage with the 100th commemoration in 2015;

• Wikipedia’s page is very detailed;

• PBS produced a good documentary released in 2006, simply called Armenian Genocide. Unfortunately, it seems to only be available publicly by DVD purchase;

• Women of 1915 (2016) by Bared Maronian is an excellent documentary as well. It is available on Amazon for rent or purchase;

• To delve further into it, I recommend the books The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, as well as the first-person account of the events by Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador to Ottoman Turkey at the time of the Armenian Genocide: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, which is beyond copyright and so is available for free as an e-book.

Turkish War of Independence and Continuing Genocide (1919-1923)

In some accounts, the Armenian Genocide ended in 1916 or 1917. However, massacres resumed after those years on three separate fronts: first, during the Turkish War of Independence in 1919-23, along its eastern front, targeting Armenians in what was Russian-controlled until that time; second, against the Armenian refugees who had returned to Cilicia in southern Turkey in 1921; and third, against the Greek army that had occupied Smyrna in 1922, where the final remaining Armenian community in Anatolia was located. Note that the Turkish national “hero” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was involved in all of these later genocidal massacres of Armenians, as well as Greeks in Smyrna.

With the collapse of the Russian monarchy, and a mandate from the Treaty of Versailles and US President Wilson, the First Republic of Armenia was founded in 1918 along with the Ottoman Empire capitulating to the Allies that year. However, the Turkish Army kept troops mobilized on the nascent Armenian republic’s border. The Republic of Armenia was besieged by a refugee crisis due to the Armenian Genocide, and was soon to be invaded by Turkish nationalists under the authority of Atatürk.

Much can be written on the Turkish-Armenian war of 1920. Let us just focus on the genocidal aspects. The Turkish Grand National Assembly, whose president was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, gave orders to the commander of the Eastern Front forces Kâzım Karabekir to “eliminate Armenia physically and politically” (Kevorkian 2020, Nichanian 2015). Note that this is a clear intent to commit genocide of the Armenians from the government led by Atatürk, and why his continued glorification is so problematic. Under Atatürk’s genocidal orders, Karabekir invaded the Armenian republic and massacred 60,000 to 100,000 Armenians in their indigenous, ancestral homeland. Simultaneously, Russian Bolsheviks invaded the Republic of Armenia from the north and declared that portion of the Republic of Armenia to be part of the Soviet Union. Under the Treaty of Moscow (1921)—sometimes also called the “Treaty of Brotherhood”—Mount Ararat, its surrounding plains, as well as practically all the territory conquered by Karabekir was ceded to the Turkish Grand National Assembly by the Bolshevik government, and this was confirmed by the subsequent Treaty of Kars. The genocidal campaign of Atatürk was rewarded.

Genocide Denial in Turkey

The following acts shall be punishable… Complicity in genocide.
— UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Even during the massive atrocities of 1915-23, the perpetrators denied that it was occurring, claiming it was a resettlement campaign. The Republic of Turkey continues to deny the 1915-1923 period as genocide. The atrocities and intent to destroy are well documented within Turkish records and in records available to the Turkish government. Continuing denial and cover up of the crime of genocide, through destruction of many incriminating records in Turkey, are a continuation of the crime of genocide through complicity. Individuals in Turkey who recognize the genocide have even been subjected to prosecution for “insulting Turkishness.” Complicity in criminal law includes aiding in completion of the crime, and failing to prevent or report it. Genocide denial both aids in completing the crime and fails to prevent future crimes of genocide. The denial of genocide is widely regarded as the last stage of genocide.

According to a legal opinion from a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ongoing Turkish government’s “denial of past Ottoman and Turkish authorities’ wrongdoings is a new violation of international law” (Lattanzi 2018). By extension, denying genocide in the face of incontrovertible evidence by any government or entity should also be considered a violation of international law.

My family and I visited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC this past summer, and there—posted in in large letters—is a quote by Adolf Hitler motivating the Holocaust, which included, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” This brings to question whether the Holocaust may have been prevented if the perpetrators of the first phase of the Armenian Genocide were brought to justice.

Genocide Denial in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan is a repressive dictatorship that mirrors the policies and geopolitical outlook of Turkey. As the President of Turkey said, Azerbaijan and Turkey are “one nation, two states.” This also goes for their policy of Armenian Genocide denial. The nation of Azerbaijan denies the Armenian Genocide and actively promotes this denial internationally, in partnership with Turkey (Cheterian 2018).

So, we see that the genocide-survivor state of the Republic of Armenia is bordered on two out of three sides by genocide denying states, who, as I will discuss later, are intent on completing the Armenian Genocide.

Cultural Genocide in Turkey

An essential part of genocide and affecting its denial is the removal of any traces of the victims. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and led the effort for its recognition as an international crime, wanted to include acts and measures undertaken to eliminate any nations’ or ethnic groups’ culture to be considered a part of the crime of genocide in the UN Convention on Genocide. And, of course, cultural genocide is a necessary part of the campaign of genocide. Elimination of a people and their culture are one and the same.

A survey conducted by UNESCO in 1974 cataloged 913 extant church and monastic sites in Turkey, each in varying states of condition. Buildings at 464 sites had been completely destroyed. Of the remaining sites, 252 were in a state of ruin, while only 197 were sufficiently intact to be considered usable (Bevan 2006). These sites are of course a witness to the former indigenous Armenian presence, and were targets for elimination by the Turkish government ever since 1915.

A 1914 survey conducted by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, although not exhaustive, identified 2,549 religious sites under its jurisdiction, including over 200 monasteries and 1,600 churches. While many of these structures were destroyed during the genocide, additional sites have been vandalized, demolished, or repurposed as mosques or barns in the years since. The ongoing systematic erasure of Armenian architectural and artistic heritage continues, further obscuring the evidence of millennia of Armenian culture following the mass killings and forced exile of the Armenian population (Bevan 2006).

Cultural Genocide in Azerbaijan

A recent report by Cornell University’s Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) has used high-resolution satellite imagery spanning decades to chronicle the total eradication of Armenian cultural heritage in the Nakhitchevan exclave of Azerbaijan, starting in the late 1990s.

In the regions of Artsakh taken over by Azerbaijan since 2020, the government has claimed that ancient Armenian churches and monasteries are “Caucasian Albanian.” Officials from Azerbaijan have consistently asserted that ancient monuments in Artsakh originate from Caucasian Albanian culture, rather than Armenian. They have also labeled certain artworks at these sites that are clearly Armenian, such as khatchkars as “fabrications.” This cultural erasure is essential to the genocidal aims of Azerbaijan to eliminate the Armenians of Artsakh and their indigenous ties to the land.

Artsakh is home to over 4,000 Armenian cultural sites, including 370 churches. Given that most of these sites are now under Azerbaijani control, there is a prevailing view that Azerbaijan will eliminate them or claim they are not Armenian. Ultimately, it's feared that all of Armenian cultural heritage will be targeted and eliminated as it was in Nakhitchevan.

Ancient Artsakh to Soviet Subjugation

The history of the Armenians in Artsakh is long. I will focus on the events leading to the current genocide of the Armenians of Artsakh. Artsakh was included as part of Armenia as early as the 2nd century BC (Hewsen 2001), and, as described above, the genetics of both the Armenians of Asia Minor and Artsakh is tied to people in the region 7,800 years ago. It is widely regarded by historians that Armenians have lived in Artsakh for at least 2,000 years.

It is important to distinguish the name Artsakh from Nagorno-Karabakh. Artsakh is the ancestral Armenian name for the region, while Nagorno-Karabakh originated from the imperialist-imposed Russian Nagorno and Turkish Karabakh.

Simultaneous with the Turkish aggression of 1920, Artsakh was also subject to genocide by Azerbaijan, which declared independence for the first time in 1918 and lasted only until 1920. With hundreds massacred in Shushi by Azerbaijani forces starting in 1919, the entire Armenian population was slaughtered in September 1920, with estimates of 20,000 killed by a coalition of Turkish and Azeri forces. This attack led by one of the Young Turk perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, Enver Pasha.

By the end of 1920, Bolsheviks came to control what became the Soviet Socialist Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. On July 4, 1921, the Bolshevik Caucasus Bureau (Kavbuiro) met and, based on the overwhelmingly Armenian population of Artsakh, placed it within the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The next day, Joseph Stalin intervened with the committee, and it overturned that decision, placing Artsakh as part of the Azerbaijani SSR. This single decision has been the most critical to the fate of the Armenians of Artsakh, which are being entirely eliminated from their indigenous lands by Azerbaijani forces as I write this.

Many things led to the current state. Ever since the Armenians of Artsakh were forced into Azerbaijan, they worked within the Soviet system to try to gain autonomy or reunite with Armenia, all while under the subjugation of the Azerbaijan SSR, which saw the population of the Soviet Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) go from 94% Armenian in 1923 to 75.9% in 1979.

Resumption of Violent Genocide in Artsakh: 1988 to today

In the late 1980’s the Soviet Union’s General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev brought in a period of “perestroika” that gave the Armenians of Artsakh some hope of a new period of openness that would welcome an effort to reunite their region with Armenia. In February 1988, with a petition by 80,000 residents requesting NKAO be removed from the Azerbaijani SSR, the government of NKAO appealed to the Supreme Soviets of the USSR, Azerbaijan, and Armenia for the region to be united with the Armenian SSR. This led to escalating anti-Armenian violence and massacres in Sumgait and Kirovabad in 1988, and in Baku in 1990. In addition, Soviet forces initiated “Operation Ring” that forcibly displaced Armenians out of the Shahumyan region of Azerbaijan. In response to these events that led to hundreds of fatalities and the forced relocation of more than 400,000 Armenians, the Armenians of Artsakh invoked their right to self-determination. On September 2, 1991, they proclaimed their independence in alignment with both the Soviet Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This led to what is referred to as the “First Nagorno-Karabakh War” of 1991-1994. The initially declared Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh eventually changed its name to the Republic of Artsakh. The ceasefire of 1994 lasted 26 years.

In September of 2020, Azerbaijan launched an unprovoked genocidal military assault on the Republic of Artsakh. Artsakh was assisted by the Republic of Armenia, which was also attacked by Azerbaijan. A ceasefire was achieved in November 2020 with Artsakh losing the southern portion of the former Soviet NKAO and ceding the surrounding defensive territories it controlled. Numerous war crimes by Azerbaijan during their genocidal assault were documented. I highly recommend the multi-award-winning documentary film Motherland by Vic Gerami, which goes through the history through 2020 in clear detail, including the Azerbaijani campaign of “caviar diplomacy” preceding the assault.

The 2020 assault ended with a three-way agreement between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia to have Russian peacekeepers protect the remaining Armenians of Artsakh, and to keep the Lachin (Berdzor) corridor open between Artsakh and Armenia, an essential lifeline for food, medicine, and fuel for Artsakh that was otherwise surrounded by hostile forces.

In December 2022, the Russian obligation to keep the Lachin corridor open collapsed, with Azerbaijani state actors blockading the road through the corridor with no intervention by the Russian “peacekeepers.” The International Committee of the Red Cross still connected very limited humanitarian supplies through the corridor until June 2023, when effectively all transport into Artsakh was cut off and the humanitarian situation got exponentially worse, leading to malnutrition and miscarriages, with medical emergencies unable to be treated. By August, Armenians of Artsakh started dying due to malnutrition. At this point, experts in genocide and its prevention had designated the Azerbaijani blockade to be genocide. By August and early September of 2023, prior to the invasion by Azerbaijan into Artsakh, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the founding prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide, and Genocide Watch all declared an active genocide of the Armenians of Artsakh. Melanie O’Brien, Chair of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, determined an “ongoing genocide” in Artsakh in an interview on September 22.

The invasion of Azerbaijani forces into Artsakh on September 19, 2023 witnessed a continuation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, taking what was genocide by blockade to now be military violence against civilians. I have compiled a report of war crimes, anti-Armenian hate, cultural genocide, and the subsequent forced displacement of the Armenians of Artsakh, and will not reiterate them here. Fleeing the violence has led to over 100,000 Armenians to flee Artsakh within a few days. This is was effectively the entire population of Artsakh, with millennia of Armenian presence in the land intentionally destroyed by Azerbaijan.

A line of cars was reported to extend 60 km from the border with the Republic of Armenia to the capital of Artsakh, Stepanakert (September 26, 2023).

The Continued Existential Threat of Genocide to Armenians

So, our story comes to the present time. The Republic of Armenia is the only indigenous Armenian land still populated by Armenians. And, the threats by the genocidal—and genocide-denying—states of Turkey and Azerbaijan continue. The Azerbaijani dictator, Ilham Aliyev, has declared in the past several years that the Republic of Armenia is “Western Azerbaijan.” In a speech delivered on December 24, 2022, filled with racial hatred, Aliyev denied the existence of both the Republic of Armenia and the Armenian people as indigenous to the land. Instead, he refers to the Republic of Armenia as “Western Azerbaijan” and the people as the “Western Azerbaijan Community.” Within this speech, President Aliyev advances a reinterpretation of history that casts Armenia’s existence as illegitimate, claiming that it occupies the “historical lands” of Azerbaijan. Aliyev also has repeatedly threatened to use force to take over Armenian territory to connect with Nakhitchevan and Turkey. Azerbaijan already occupies an estimated 215 square kilometers of Armenia, with attacks on Armenia proper last occurring just one year ago, in September 2022, killing over 200 Armenians, with Azerbaijan’s many gruesome war crimes documented.

And, in Turkey, Aliyev appears to have a willing partner. Just prior to the 2020 attack on Artsakh, President Erdogan of Turkey said of Armenia, “We will continue to fulfill this mission which our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus region.” 

Speaking in 2005 to a municipal delegation from Bavaria, Germany, the mayor of Baku, Hajibala Abutalybov, stated “Our goal is the complete elimination of Armenians. You, Nazis, already eliminated the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, right? You should be able to understand us.”

I visited Armenia this past summer, and standing at the top of the Cascade overlook in Yerevan, I could see Mount Ararat and the plains below it very clearly, with the Turkish border ominously only about 20 miles away (see my photo below). With Armenia bordered by two genocide-denialist states that also vow to complete the genocide, its clear that eliminating the Armenians of Artsakh is only the latest chapter in the ongoing Armenian Genocide, unless the world fulfills its obligation to act on Never Again.

How You Can Help

Since publishing this, I have received many queries from people asking how they can help. I suggest:

• Center for Truth and Justice - This non-profit is collecting the evidentiary material of war crimes, human rights abuses, and genocide by Azerbaijan, for use in prosecution. It was founded by attorneys and judges in Orange County.

• Armenian Relief Society - This non-profit was founded in 1910 and provides direct support to Artsakh families.

• PAROS Foundation - This non-profit directly helps Artsakh refugees and those most in need in Armenia. 100% of donations go to projects, as the foundation underwrites all administrative costs.

• Armenian National Committee of America - This is an American, grass-roots political advocacy group that strives toward the United States administration to act to halt the ongoing Armenian Genocide, as well as other top Armenian-American priorities.

• Armenian Assembly of America - This is a non-profit organization that advocates for federal action supporting Armenian-American priorities.

Today, I was made aware that the offices of City of Irvine Councilmembers have gotten emails requesting May 28 be recognized as the “National Day of Azerbaijan” as, over 100 years ago, there was a less than two-year period of a proclaimed democratic republic on a disputed portion of present-day Azerbaijan. This “republic” existed from May 28, 1918 to April 28, 1920, when the government surrendered to Bolsheviks.

It would defy human decency and rationality to issue a proclamation recognizing Azerbaijan as a republic. Azerbaijan is a dictatorship, or consolidated authoritarian regime—not a democratic republic—scoring 1 out of 100 on their Democracy Score from Freedom House.

In 2020, the authoritarian regime in Azerbaijan initiated a genocidal assault on the Armenians of Artsakh, resulting in the deaths of more than 5,000 Armenians, and the displacement of over 91,000 Armenians from their homes. This recent genocidal attack remains largely unknown in the American media-sphere.

More recently, Azerbaijan initiated another genocidal assault on Armenia itself just 8 months ago, resulting in the deaths of over 200 Armenians, and Azerbaijan’s current continued occupation of the sovereign territory of Armenia. In a currently ongoing offensive, Azerbaijan has blockaded Artsakh for 170 days now, using Medieval siege tactics to deprive the Armenian population of food, medicine, energy and clean water, in an attempt to depopulate the indigenous population. The so-called Azerbaijan Democratic Republic does not recognize the Armenian Genocide, but is actually acting to continue the genocide.

In the above picture, the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral of Shushi is shown damaged by an attack by Azerbaijani forces in October 2020, and it has since been altered to remove traces of its Armenian history, which is part of an ongoing large-scale cultural genocide by Azerbaijan of removing Armenian heritage in territory it controls.

Under no circumstances should the genocidal, authoritarian regime in Azerbaijan be positively recognized. Instead, defend human rights and help halt the continuing genocide by recognizing the nascent Republic of Artsakh, an actual democracy that represents the self-determination of the indigenous Armenians who have populated the area for millenia.

While on the road this past week, I was thinking of this analysis that can be done, and in between things, I did it. I took the 2018 Newsom vs. Cox spread, considered by many to be a good indicator of R vs D spead in the new districts, and corrected for new variations relative to 2018 due to Democratic under-voting, demographic shifts, and other factors, using the 2022 primary election results. The results are in the sheet linked below.

Key results for Irvine:

• Congresswoman Katie Porter has about a 89% chance of winning her district (CD 47), greatly outperforming Newsom in her district

• Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris has about a 95% chance of winning her district (AD 73), also outperforming Newsom in her district

• If applying the same partisan-based methodology for Supervisor Katrina Foley's race, this method says that she has about an 11% chance of winning her district (BOS D5), this is not expected to be an accurate prediction for a non-partisan race. The many candidates in the primary split the vote, and as an incumbent, her chances are much higher. It does mean we have work to do!

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't like even a 11% chance of Katie losing, a 5% chance of Cottie losing, and the chance of Katrina losing is too high even if this calculation isn't accurate! We have some work to do for November!

Data is summarized in this spreadsheet.

Kurzgesagt: “What Are You Doing With Your Life? The Tail End“ 

Academy of Ideas: “Life as a Quest - The Antidote to a Wasted Existence”

“This is Water” - David Foster Wallace’s Impactful Commencement Speech

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell

And, for this year, I am adding an excerpt from Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness:

“The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. The [person] who can forget [their] worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent, or the life history of stars, will find that, when [they return] from [their] excursion into the impersonal world, [they have] acquired a poise and calm which enable [them] to deal with [their] worries in the best way, and [they] will in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness. The secret of happiness is this: Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.” [emphasis mine]

— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Part II. Causes of Happiness, Chapter X: Is Happiness Still Possible?

Best wishes for your summer and beyond!

As with most social media, the large fraction of content is not worth one’s time. However, there’s also some great content out there. The first two here are among my favorites, and Mr. P. Solver is good, too:

• Vihart: self-described “mathemusician.” She is probably my favorite math or physics YouTuber. Some of her videos evoke an emotional reaction in me. Here's some of my favorites:

  • 9.999... reasons that .999... = 1

  • How many kinds of infinity are there?

  • Proof some infinities are bigger than other infinities

  • Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant

  • What is up with Noises? (The Science and Mathematics of Sound, Frequency, and Pitch)

  • Hexaflexagons

• 3Blue1Brown: a master in python animation and excellent expositor of complicated topics. I discovered him in his great explainer of bitcoin blockchain. Here’s some more math & physics ones that are excellent:

  • Some light quantum mechanics (with minutephysics) 

  • The more general uncertainty principle, beyond quantum

  • Visualizing the Riemann zeta function and analytic continuation

  • But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction.

• Mr. P. Solver: he mostly solves canonical physics systems using python. He's highly enthusiastic... Here’s some specifically quantum mechanics ones:

  •  2D Schrodinger Equation Numerical Solution in Python

  • Time-Dependent Schrodinger Equation in Python: Two Different Techniques

  • Quantum Addition of Angular Momentum in Python: Obtaining the Clebsch-Gordan Coefficients

And, if you just want a great explainer of the history and fundamentals of interpreting quantum mechanics, I highly recommend Sean Carroll's talk to The Royal Institution. Plus, practically everything Kurzgesagt produces is excellent.

Next month marks the remembrance of 107 years since the start of what is recognized as the world’s first modern genocide: the Armenian Genocide.

Many have seen reports on the video where the mayor of my city, Irvine, Farrah Khan joked with one of America’s most notorious Armenian Genocide deniers about Armenians “disappearing.” The joke-teller himself confirmed that the joke was about genocide.

Since then, several people have requested to learn more about the Armenian Genocide. It is hard, as someone whose family were victims of that genocide to have to re-visit the history, but I have put together the following primer because these events should be known:

• There is a good 3 1/2 minute history crash course here. It uses stick figure animations, so it feels a bit inappropriate for the topic of genocide. But, they probably are a frugal YouTube channel. 

• This is a longer video and has a much more detailed history in it, though some details I feel that the commentator does get inaccurate, such as the importance of a document discovered in 2017 for establishing the Young Turks’ intent. That intent was clear in an overwhelming set of primary sources, including the reports of the American ambassador to Ottoman Turkey at the time, Henry Morgenthau. Also, since this video, President Biden did recognized the Armenian Genocide last year, and President Reagan also did in 1981. Importantly, the commentator makes an excuse for the name of a news channel called “The Young Turks.” That is a reprehensible name, equivalent to calling it “The Nazi Channel.” Those are the names of the political groups that perpetrated genocide. The channel must change its name.

• The online Armenian Genocide Museum of America is excellent.

• The LA Times had significant coverage with the 100th commemoration in 2015.

• Wikipedia’s page is very detailed.

• PBS produced a good documentary released in 2006, simply called Armenian Genocide. Unfortunately, it seems to only be available publicly by DVD purchase. I own a copy, and if you live nearby, I would be happy to loan it out.

• Women of 1915 (2016) by Bared Maronian is an excellent documentary as well. It is available on Amazon for rent or purchase. I also own a DVD of this documentary and can loan it out. Thank you goes to Bared for gifting me a copy.

• To delve further into it, I recommend the books The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, as well as the first-person account of the events by Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador to Ottoman Turkey at the time of the Armenian Genocide: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, which is beyond copyright and so is available for free as an e-book.

To close, I must also say that the mayor’s association with Armenian Genocide denalists and her laughter at their jokes is reprehensible, and must be condemned. Sadly, only Armenian-American organizations have, so far: the ANCA OC, and the Southern California Armenian Democrats. In responses to the video on twitter, there have been denials of the Armenian Genocide, and even calls for its completion. A person on reddit put it well when the discussion focused on the details of the nature of the perverse joke, and not the fact that it was coming from one of America’s most notorious genocide deniers saying something, anything about Armenians “disappearing:”

[I]t is really shocking to see the state of this country and especially Southern California.

The absolute lack of care from those of you here and those of you in this state in general. From Americans in general. We as Armenians really are treated worse than second class citizens. Worse than animals. A man is allowed to very openly and publicly deny the genocide committed against us. Not only that he’s allowed to be involved with the mayor of an American city. AND he and said mayor are allowed to make jokes regarding the fact that Armenians suffered a genocide, in public.

Please tell me those of you here making excuses, tell me if a holocaust denier laughing about the extermination of Jews with the mayor of Irvine would be acceptable to you. Or a klansman laughing about the lynching of African Americans? Would such people be welcome to be involved with your mayor? Would anybody associating with such a person get away with it? No they wouldn’t.

Yet here I see many of you come in quick defense of your major. “But wait what if this was said” “No this was actually said” “No I don’t think that’s what it was”. Of course, it’s just a man who is a known Turkish identity supremacist and a man who writes hateful disgusting insults about Armenians online, having a get together with YOUR MAYOR and making disparaging comments about us SHE LAUGHED AT.

But it’s against Armenians it’s ok. You can mock us. You make fun of our appearance, you deny our genocide or ignore it. It is really shocking that still, a hundred years later, I have to be worried. In Southern California I have to be subjected to racist hateful people that don’t  even think I have the right to exist.

If you excuse the behavior of this mayor you are excusing racism and hatred against me and the rest of us. I am depressed and ashamed tonight. I regret knowing so many Armenian-Americans served this country in war, and contributed to this country’s development. We should not be where we are not wanted I guess.

Many Armenians remain hurt and victimized by the losses of their own families, and revictimized by the dismissals, denials, and hate that continue. Learning about what happened helps bring healing and assurances of #1915NeverAgain. Tragically, with the attacks by Azerbaijan on civilians in Armenian Artsakh right now, many Armenians feel that the genocide only continues.

At that February 8 City Council meeting, there was an important question posed by Councilmember Larry Agran, and that was what the effect on electricity rates would be if more people opted out of OCPA, and stayed with SoCal Edison, than what OCPA’s financial model assumed. The CFO Tiffany Law said that the pricing models from OCPA were based on a 5% opt-out rate for residents, and 10% for businesses. But what happens if the opt-out rate is higher than expected?

CFO Law stated, “If it increases than our expectation or our assumption, it won’t have a significant financial impact, because the revenue will match with all the costs of energy.”

After Councilmember Agran sought clarification, Ms. Law continued, “If more people chose to opt-out, more than 10%, let’s just say, the costs of energy will decrease as well as our revenue. So, because of the matching principle, there will be no significant financial impact to us.” (See the exchange here.)

As a physicist, I know that taking the extremal of a claim is a good way to test if the claim is true. If CFO Law’s “matching principle” is true, then if only one customer remained in OCPA, then the claim would be that their costs would still match the revenue from that single customer. Of course, this cannot be the case. A single customer certainly could not cover their overhead, which includes the OCPA CEO’s $239,000 annual salary.

So, the question remains unanswered. Somewhere between 100% retention and retention of only one customer is where the CFO’s “matching principle” fails in having OCPA cover their costs for providing electricity. What is that fraction?

Based on how power purchasing works, we also know that costs cannot necessarily always match revenue. Cal-CCA.org has a nice summary of the nature of the power purchasing, which happens under short (0-5 years), medium (6-10 years), and long-term (10+ years) power purchase agreements. For example, “CleanPowerSF has signed two agreements to purchase power from a new 100-megawatt solar project to be built in Lancaster, California and a new 47-megawatt wind project in Mohave, California. The contract terms are between 10 and 22 years.” Since opt-out is on a month-to-month basis, for a perfect matching principle to work, power purchasing would have to be on a spot market, which is by far the costliest way to purchase electrical energy.

Customer opt-out risk is known to be a primary risk for CCEs. Western Community Energy (WCE), a recently-bankrupt CCE in Riverside County, wrote in its October 2019 Energy Risk Management Policy that “Customer opt-out risk is the primary risk WCE faces and includes any condition or event that creates uncertainty within, or a diminution, of WCE’s customer base, thereby increasing the potential for WCE to not meet its Policy goals.” (OC Power’s Energy Risk Management Report is—for some reason—not properly linked in its key documentation as I write this.)

We also know from the experience of WCE that a revenue and cost mismatch can lead to disastrous outcomes for CCEs, including bankruptcy. Even with a reported opt-out rate of 8.26% in April 2021, unexpected costs and less than anticipated revenue led to WCE’s board to direct an unscheduled rate increase of up to 20% in April 2021. With that still not covering their costs, WCE filed for bankruptcy the next month, but then within weeks stopped entirely as an electricity provider and de-registered, transfering all of its remaining customers back to SCE.

If we want to successfully have 100% renewable electricity for Irvine, let’s hope OCPA does not face the same fate as WCE. With their CFO not clearly identifying their exposure to risks, including customer opt-out, it leaves me less confident than I would like to be.

Irvine, as a leading scientific hub with the presence of its own University of California campus, had previously seen scientific advocacy on an existential threat. The UCI chemists who discovered that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer—Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, who won the Nobel Prize for their work—also lead efforts to ban the destructive chemicals. The City of Irvine passed a pioneering CFC ban ordinance in 1989 that is widely acknowledged as a model that led to broader CFC bans. As CityLab wrote, “The move made national headlines. The New York Times called the ordinance ‘the most far-reaching measure’ to protect the ozone, and the Los Angeles Times declared it ‘the most comprehensive law in the nation’ against CFCs.” At the City Council level, that effort was led by then-Mayor Larry Agran. He has served on-and-off Irvine’s City Council since 1978, and was re-elected in his current term in 2020.

Jumping forward to now, we see the scientific community overwhelmingly united in drawing attention to the need to take action on a new planetary-level crisis we face: climate change. And that is even more so than in 2017. In 2019, I joined 11,000 other scientists in a “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” that called for prompt response and immediate, transformative change with the need to replace fossil fuels with renewables. The 2021 update on that warning delivered our approach to tipping points that are likely irreversible. And, the snippet above of some of the media coverage accurately portrayed the scale of the crisis unfolding. The 6th assessment report last year by the IPCC also called for rapid and drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.

The step forward with fully renewable sources for Irvine’s residential and business electricity was significant. But, it only addresses about 27% of Irvine’s energy usage. In 2019, Ben Leffel, Giana Lum and I published an analysis showing that natural gas and transportation made up the overwhelming fraction of our fossil-fuel usage, but it could also be completely accommodated by the solar energy hitting residential rooftops (OC Register and ICNV). I wrote a detailed report for the Green Ribbon Environmental Committee in 2021 on the energy need and solar resource available.

With opting into 100% renewable electrical energy this week—implemented this year to commercial entities in April and to residential in the fall—the other two largest fossil-fuel energy sectors remain to be solved by our City. In August 2021, the Green Ribbon Environmental Committee passed the ACHIEVES Resolution calling to decarbonize our buildings’ natural gas usage with an electrification ordinance, and investment in zero-emission vehicles. There is a fierce urgency to tackle those now.

Last, but not least, the Green Ribbon Environmental Committee has asked for an update on the plans of the Orange County Power Authority, which is our City-established and City-funded CCE tasked with delivering the choice of 100% renewable electricity. We have not gotten such an update. Councilmember Larry Agran has also asked for such an update, with none given to the City, which again, is solely funding its operations. One question I would specifically would like to know the answer to is that why, if renewable electricity is now wholesale cheaper than fossil-fuel electricity, OCPA is charging more for the 100% renewable option than the mostly fossil-fuel option. I hope we can know.

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the major global observatory for very high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray astronomy over the next decade and beyond. Covering a photon energy range from 20 GeV to 300 TeV, CTA will have a wider field-of-view, higher sensitivity, and better angular resolution than any instrument that has gone before. Its two arrays will have unprecedented capability for surveys, imaging of gamma-ray sources and time-domain astrophysics. CTA’s science remit is wide, covering everything from supernova remnants to fundamental physics questions

This talk will start with a brief introduction to atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, followed by an overview of CTA, the UK's contribution, and its science aims, particularly those relating to active galactic nuclei, quantum gravity, dark matter and gamma-ray bursts.

Register here.

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Science Diplomacy: Using International Scientific Collaboration to Build Bridges between Communities (APS)
Tuesday, December 7, 12:00 noon PT

What does a “science diplomat” do? Even in times of strained political relations among countries, scientists have transcended national boundaries to collaborate on shared interests and concerns. This session will highlight how science diplomacy has advanced physics and how scientists can use international scientific collaboration to build bridges between communities.

Register here.

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Perfectionism and Imposter Syndrome - Career Development Webinar (AAS)
Dr. Desiree Dickerson 
Wednesday, December 8, 9 am PT

Perfectionism drives us to great heights, to excel, and to maintain our edge. We rarely stop to see the costs it carries. Imposter syndrome distorts the way we see ourselves, our performance, and our capabilities. Both reflect our doubts and fears — fear of being judged, fear of failing, fear of not being good enough, fear of not belonging. They’re the product of distorted thinking patterns. Thinking patterns that we can change.

In this webinar led by neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Desiree Dickerson, we will explore:

• The true costs of these doubts and fears, and the extent to which they are impacting your productivity, mental clarity, and your joy of what you do.

• Simple ways to notice when your perfectionism or imposter syndrome is tripping you up.

• Simple ways to reshape your inner critic to be more objective and more compassionate, so that you can thrive thanks to the voice inside your head rather than in spite of it.

Desiree Dickerson, PhD, is based in Valencia, Spain. Her work informs the interplay between mental health and well-being in academic and research settings.

Register here.

Dr. Payel Das, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Astrophysics (University of Surrey)

Stars in the night sky like our Sun have been around almost since the birth of the Universe. They have witnessed a number of interactions between our Milky Way galaxy and other nearby galaxies. What they are made out of and how they move encodes their origins and any interactions they have been involved in. Some stars for example, were born in a nearby galaxy that fell into our Milky Way. Stars are therefore a bit like the fossils we find here on Earth. Galactic archaeologists are collecting many millions of stellar fossils to work out why our Milky Way looks like it does now. I will share some of the secrets of making an excellent galactic archaeologist and will invite you to help me find the origins of some stars in our night sky. You will have the opportunity to understand how astronomers use stars to understand the transformation of galaxies from irregular blobs in the early Universe into the beautiful spiral and elliptical galaxies of today.

Register here.

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PRISM Speakers: Shining a light on the queer side of science for LGBTQ+ STEM Day (Exeter Library)
Wednesday, November 17, 10:30 am PT

Alexandre Coates (Heriot Watt University) - "Shaking things up: how the messy world around us affects quantum mechanics (and researchers)"

Dr. Jon Davies (U. Exeter) - "How our genes shape our brain's development"

Information and registration here.

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New Strategies in the Search for Cosmic Company (NAS)
Wednesday, November 17, 6pm PT

Dr. Seth Shostak, SETI Institute

Are we alone in the universe? The scientific hunt for extraterrestrial life is now well into its fifth decade, and we still haven’t discovered any cosmic company. Could all this mean that finding biology beyond Earth, even if it exists, is a project for the ages – one that might take centuries or longer? New approaches and new technology for detecting life and sentient beings elsewhere suggest that there is good reason to expect that we could uncover evidence even of sophisticated civilizations – the type of aliens we see in the movies and on TV – within a few decades. It could be that the hunt for radio or laser signals is not the best way to proceed. But if we do find E.T., what would be the societal impact of learning that something, or someone, is out there?

Register here.

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The fantastic world of 2D materials (IOP)
Thursday, November 18, 11 am PT

Dr. Juliana Morbec (Keeley University) 

Go upon a journey to explore the world of two-dimensional materials, this class of very thin materials that has been showing huge promise for a variety of technological applications. Dr. Morbec will discuss what makes such materials so attractive and how they can revolutionize the development of future technological devices.

Register before November 18, 9 am PT.