Physics, Math, and Life @mirastudiesphysics - Tumblr Blog

Intro Post

2025-11-18

It's been a long time since I've started this blog, and I honestly didn't think it would still be around 5 years later. Since a lot has changed in that time, I thought it might be about time to finally update the pinned post.

I'm Mira, a physics PhD candidate currently working on cosmology research (day-to-day stuff is mostly programming and data analysis, but research interests lie in dark energy and weak gravitational lensing). What began as a typical studyblr - posting photos of study materials, listing out to-dos, sharing study tips - has gradually become just a blog of random thoughts and reflections on my graduate school journey and academia as a whole.

I do not keep this blog going for any particular audience, and my interests and style will change over time. If for some reason my ramblings or reblogs bring you joy then by all means you’re welcome to come and go as you please.

I’m always open to conversations and interactions, I just might be slow to respond. I have a bad habit of opening messages to make the notification go away and then forgetting to respond (oops).

Common Tags

I do try to tag things to keep posts organized, and more or less succeed.

#studyblr / #aesthetic - go-to tag combination for typical studyblr posts that I think look nice and give me motivation

#ref - a post that contains a lot of text and additional materials that I'd like to be able to easily reference later

#words - inspirational or thoughtful pieces of text

#ramblings - more stream of conscious thoughts that aren't meant to be polished (bad at tagging these ones lately!)

#my post - more polished posts of mine, usually with the typical studyblr format of nice photos and text

#gradblr - posts more aligned with the graduate side of tumblr

#physics studyblr - typical studyblr posts that are focused on physics

#ask - answered asks from my inbox

#my post #physics studyblr #gradblr #pinned post #studyblr

studyblrspace

yellow 🌼

#aesthetic #happy flowers

I'm a little amused with my relationship with this galaxy cluster community since I keep getting added to projects like I'm the token cosmic shear person. "hey guys yeah it's me again, I also don't know why I'm here. just for moral support i guess"

#ramblings

mirastudiesphysics

As you progress in your education and perhaps begin doing research projects, there becomes this ideal of "independent research", the kind of thing that turns you into a professional rather than a student. And I'm beginning to think that this is a bit of a misnomer in how people interpret this phrase and the idea behind it.

In graduate school, you are training to become an independent researcher, that's basically the whole idea. The common ideal archetype is the "multiple first-author papers grad student who never needs help nor asks questions". And while being able to lead a project to the natural conclusion of a paper is an integral skill, it's rarely done alone or entirely independently. In truth, research is typically very collaborative and it's rare to work alone.

My more recent interpretation of becoming an "independent researcher" is more about learning how to be responsible for your own work. This means taking the initiative to see it complete and correct. This can look like asking for advice from other experts, teaching collaborators so they can get up to speed, or double checking that your work is consistent with other literature/logic.

Obviously this is not an overnight process, and it's something I've only recently could put into words. Learning how to do all of this is hard, and I'm in the middle of this frankly scary and painful transition.

#bringing this back as peeps start summer research

wtf-scientific-papers

[Many college students experience introductory physics as psychologically threatening.]

Benson-Greenwald et al. (2026)

hungwy

CHORE IVE PUT OFF FOR 2 MONTHS DONE RAAAAAARGHHHHH POWER OF THE DRAGON

We have a new first year grad student in my lab and I think I'm discovering the older grad student goofy instinct. Like I neeeeeeed to be goofy around this person because I so need them to know that science isn't that serious and can be fun and silly.

#ramblings #i think this student just reminds me a lot of when I first started and I was so so grateful to the post docs who were willing to be silly

coffeemlk

i'm a happy boy

#studyblr #aesthetic

probablyasocialecologist

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

wire-smith

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

twiststreet

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

#ref

ijaazat

summer

1. make a syllabus for yourself - books, media, places, recipes

2. complete 40% of it

3. eat every fruit u can

Sometimes supporting early career scientists looks like bullying them into writing a first author paper on their data so they actually get the academic credit of doing a bunch of technical work. Hi, it's me, the early career scientist.

#ramblings #physics studyblr #my advisor is great in that he lets me do my own thing #but that means my other mentors are bullying me now for my own good

I found this software design textbook left in my apartment's freebie area, along with some tech bro self help books. I can still smell the cologne, so I'm spitefully reclaiming this book with some silly highlighters. It feels like rehoming a neglected and misunderstood pet.

#studyblr #my little headcanon is that a jilted lover threw out their crap #completely unfounded but the imaginary scene makes me laugh

thepromiscuousfinger

chaifootsteps

#Please little bird

meriwetherwrites

I love that the modern-day tumblr post equivalent of chain emails only requires me to reblog a relatively pleasant image instead of forward an email to a bunch of my friends and family members to quell my raging anxiety.