I’m Tom Rivlin, I have a PhD in physics from University College London, and an MSci in physics with theoretical physics from Imperial College London. I was born in Tel Aviv, but moved to London when I was less than a year old, and spent the next 26 years there. In January 2020 I began work as a physics postdoc at the Weizmann Institue of Science in Rehovot, Israel, before moving to Vienna, Austria in November 2022 to work as a postdoc at TU Wien’s Atominstitut. Today I split my time between the UK and Austria.

I’m also a popular science writer, having worked for a number of student publications in the past, and now I work as a freelance writer for the YouTube channel SciShow. There, I write scripts about physics, math(s!), computing, astronomy and more. I have also written for a number of other popular science outlets, including the New Scientist magazine, the PBS Space Time YouTube channel, and Chalkdust magazine.

My research interests are mostly in the realm of quantum mechanics. Today, I work on quantum thermodynamics, studying questions related to the thermodynamics of the measurement process, and to the entropy of closed quantum systems, all with a view to connect these ideas to quantum foundations. My PhD work, however, was in atomic and molecular physics, where I wrote code to do numerical quantum scattering calculations. Then in my first postdoc, I worked on the theoretical study of tunnelling times (and transition times) in quantum mechanics, with connections to more broad questions of the nature of time in quanutm mechanics in general.

Outside of science, I’m an enthusiastic sci-fi/genre fiction and board/role-playing games fan, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Pokémon. I’m also politically active, having been involved in a number of election campaigns for the UK Labour Party when I lived there.

For academic inquiries, my e-mail address can be found at this link. To get in touch about anything else, you can reach me at [email protected]

In terms of social media, my main point-of-contact is Bluesky, where my DMs are open if you want to get in touch!