Hi! I’m Laura Cui (@reionize on Twitter), and I’m currently doing a PhD in quantum information theory at Caltech. before this, I did my undergrad in physics and math at MIT. I also like tea, watercolors, cameras, Bayesian inference, and marine biology. You can ask me questions or share feedback anonymously here.
This blog is a collection of my mediumform thoughts and contributions to conversations around art, science, and life. I try to write regularly mainly to document my own thought processes and to share any interesting updates, but I hope that these posts will occasionally be relevant to other people. I previously hosted everything on Wordpress, but decided to migrate to Substack in 2023 to make it easier to integrate with email, Twitter, and RSS. feel free to reach out or read more about my work on my personal site!
Fun fact: I chose my username back in 2017, inspired by an interest in space science, cosmology, and fundamental physics. immediately after the Big Bang, the universe is believed to have been a hot soup of particles. these eventually cooled and underwent a phase transition to become a uniform gas of (mostly) neutral hydrogen, starting off the “dark ages” of the universe. a second “phase transition” occurred when finally, after about 400 million years, clusters of matter began to condense into stars which were massive enough to reionize hydrogen in their cores, radiating light and energy. the rest is history :)
