Overview

I’m Tom Rivlin, a physics postdoc at TU Wien in Vienna, Austria, and a freelance science writer, originally from London, UK. At TU Wien, I work at the Atominstitut in the group of Prof. Marcus Huber, and as a writer, I primarily work with the YouTube channel SciShow. This site gives a general overview of my various career interests, but is only intermittently updated.

For academic inquiries, I encourage you to view my page on the website of the Atominstitut Theory Division, which also has my academic email address and more details of my research interests. A more detailed CV can be found on my LinkedIn page. For inquiries related to my writing work or anything else non-academic, you can reach me at [email protected]

For social media, my main point-of-contact is Bluesky, where my DMs are open if you want to get in touch. (I do check other sites infrequently, too.)

Research

Today my research interests are in various branches of quantum theory: mainly optics, thermodynamics, and foundations. I have a PhD in physics from University College London, and an MSci in physics with theoretical physics from Imperial College London. I also worked as a postdoc at the Weizmann Institue of Science from 2020 to 2022 before coming to Vienna.

My work on quantum thermodynamics mainly concerns questions related to the thermodynamics of the measurement process, and to properties of entropy, all with a view to connect these ideas to quantum foundations. For instance, I am currently researching how thermodynamic and statistical-mechanical concerns affect the Wigner’s Friend scenario. Likewise my work on quantum optics also relates to foundational questions: I am currently interested in the properties of quasiprobability distributions like the Wigner function, and am working to connect them to contextuality and tests of nonclassicality, as well as attempting to understand the properties of quantum phase spaces more broadly.

Previously, I worked in different areas of physics. My PhD work was in atomic and molecular physics, where I wrote code to do numerical quantum scattering calculations using the Wigner R-matrix method. Then in my first postdoc, I worked on the theoretical study of tunnelling times (and transition times) in quantum mechanics, studying quantities such as the Wigner phase time, with connections to more broad questions of the nature of time in quanutm mechanics in general.

Writing

Most of my freelance writing work is with the YouTube channel SciShow, with whom I have worked since 2018 as a script writer. I have written many scripts about physics, maths, computing, and astronomy, and even on occasion have written about AI, history, archaeology, and linguistics. In the past, I worked for a number of student publications, most notably UCL’s Chalkdust Magazine. And besides SciShow, I have written for various other popular science outlets, including New Scientist magazine, and the PBS Space Time YouTube channel.

Other

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 a long-suffering social democrat with party memberships in multiple countries, and a history of political campaigning.