About me
My name is Tanausú Hernández-Yanes, born and raised in Canary Islands, Spain. I am a theoretical physicist working in quantum-related topics like quantum metrology, quantum information, and time crystals. I have a passion for science outreach, science visualization, and digital fabrication (3D printing, laser cutting, CNC milling). I have a PhD in atomic physics and am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Jagiellonian University under Prof. Kzrysztof Sacha.
About the blog
This Is a Pipe is a direct reference to Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images, tightly bound to the concept of simulation and our perception of physical reality.
I do not plan to provoke any philosophers or otherwise with this statement, but I want to playfully highlight how effective scientific inquiry has carried us in understanding reality with a big caveat: we test reality against a model, reality itself is intractable. Science allows us to come up with very precise models for any phenomena we come across, but a tighly working model is not a guarantee that the model represents reality faithfully. In fact, scientific progress happens when models break down, either from inside (the theory) or outside (the experiment). To live happily with this perturbing fact we must accept the absurd, the fact that our models describe reality, until they do not, so we just need a better model! To live critically is to believe, to tell ourselves the sensible lie, that the model which adjusts best to reality is reality, until it breaks and we must embrace uncertainty without a second tought. To accept that the picture that represents a pipe is, for all purposes, a pipe as well.
This blog is my attempt to try to visualize and explain physics models and ideas relevant to current research that explain some part of reality. I want to experiment with representations and physicalizations, so expect some playful attempts at bringing those ideas to life in different digital and physical forms.