Gerard McCaul

Loose Canon

I'm a theoretical physicist. My work covers quantum dynamics, open systems, and the curious regularity that every quantitative theory built by throwing away irrelevant detail ends up looking thermodynamic. I also write unbearably wordy essays, and compose music that makes people wince.

Scholar ORCID ResearchGate GitHub CV
Gerard McCaul Sketch

Playing chess in Carrollton Station.
Sketch by Toni Carlone

The Work
Synthetics →
The current programme: statistical lawhood under finite description. Four axioms force the KL divergence as the measure of lawhood; what a description keeps of a lawful world, what it pays, and the structured way it fails.
5 working drafts
Physics →
The published record: quantum control, open systems, superoscillations, reservoir computing. Driven Imposters showed one quantum material can be made to mimic the optical response of another; superoscillating waveforms delivered a 100-fold enhancement in spectroscopic contrast.
25+ papers · PRL 2020 (featured in Quanta Magazine) · PRL 2023
Talks →
Slides from seminars and colloquia — dynamics, computation, and the laws of learning — kept where a talk outlives its hour.
/talks/
Writing →
Essays on physics, machine intelligence, and the occasionally unbearable nature of modern theory, at The Little Learning Machine; prize-winning pieces elsewhere.
FQxI essay, 2nd place · Substack
Music →
Songs and such. Bad in a way only the autodidactic can be.
The Engine

EigenEngine

The synthetics, built into a machine: EigenEngine compiles a corpus into a graded structure (the conceptric) and generates documents from it. Its page carries its own build record, and the demo is the engine's own editor over a real corpus.

paper + talk, engine-generated shell generated from a spine live elements baked at commit
falqon91 nodes · 140 edges eigenengine109 nodes · 221 edges
The engine → Open the interface demo →
/demo/ — the conceptric editor over a real corpus, client-side, baked at commit. Passphrase required; comments land in the engine's intake.