Nabil Iqbal
@nblqbl
Theoretical physics. Usually professor at Durham U. This year at AMLab in Amsterdam working on ML.
Here is an explanation of string theory, in the form of a parable about fish and water. 1/N.
As a longtime humanitarian who has battled famines and hunger crises, I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality. A thread on famine momentum, famine response, and what it means for Gaza today.
Doctors and health officials report wave of hunger deaths in Gaza on.ft.com/46iUoK6
apparently a lack of "biometrics" -- a bit hard to take fingerprints in gaza right now -- is stopping these students from coming to the UK. the home office continues to sink to strange new lows, truly amazing and unexpected minima
The UK government is blocking Palestinian students in Gaza from taking up UK scholarships. Some have been killed while waiting, reports @guardian. We’ve written to the Home Secretary demanding action. theguardian.com/education/2025…
Our Advanced Physics School has started! Many thanks to all of our generous donor who made this possible! Go quantum physics! scientists4palestine.org/palestinian-ad… (Some action pictures below)
Hello Jordan! I am extremely grateful to co-organize a summer school with @Sci4Pal on quantum physics for Palestinian students. ...Later, today, they might even get introduced to the Swampland program:)
Israel's siege is starving the people of Gaza. We have joined more than 100 aid and rights groups to demand action - before there is no one left to save. Read the full statement here: bit.ly/3GPCpAE
More than 100 aid agencies say 'mass starvation' is spreading across Gaza bbc.in/3TTQMa0
virtually unknown comics resurfacing: bill watterson (calvin and hobbes) drew this in 2015:
It's an indictment on the state of humankind that when people post pleading with the world's powers to stop children from being starved and killed, somehow it can provoke not only controversy but opposition. Our future generations have every right to condemn us for this failure.
The apathy being shown towards footage of children dying and people starving is heartbreaking and should transcend any ideology. There are people in power who could surely stop this. This is all. (2/2)
In a new op-ed for @nytimes, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies @bartov_omer explains why he believes "Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people," something Israel denies: nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opi… Back in December, I spoke with Professor Bartov about…
Happens today! 🗓️Tue, July 15 @ 11 AM 📍East Exhibition Hall A-B #E-3512 Unfortunately I was not able to attend, so please DM if you want to chat about hierarchical models, irregular geometries or scalable physical modeling :) @FEijkelboom will present the poster for me on-site
🤹 New blog post! I write about our recent work on using hierarchical trees to enable sparse attention over irregular data (point clouds, meshes) - Erwin Transformer. blog: maxxxzdn.github.io/blog/erwin/ paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.17019 Compressed version in the thread below:
A man cannot prompt the same model twice, for it is not the same model, and he is not the same man
Intuitive explanation of flow matching
Flow Matching (FM) is one of the hottest ideas in generative AI - and it’s everywhere at #ICML2025. But what is it? And why is it so elegant? 🤔 This thread is an animated, intuitive intro into (Variational) Flow Matching - no dense math required. Let's dive in! 🧵👇
this is art
The is diabolical... a Python object that hallucinates method implementations on demand any time you call them, using my LLM Python library github.com/awwaiid/gremllm
If you can view stereo pairs with crossed eyes, here is Proxima Centauri seen from two locations 47 astronomical units apart: Earth, and the New Horizons spacecraft.
Rayleigh scattering beautifully illustrates the power of effective field theories, which can explain why the sky appears blue during the day and red in the morning and evening The leading operator that described scattering of photons on neutral atoms Ψ is c Ψbar Ψ F^2, where F…
Rayleigh scattering is the elastic scattering of light (or other electromagnetic radiation) by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light (d≪λ). At sunrise and sunset, sunlight traverses a longer path through the atmosphere, scattering out most of the blue light…
A devastating photo by Palestinian photographer Saeed Jaras.