Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar is a scientist and science writer based in Boston, USA. He has been blogging at the “Curious Wavefunction” blog for more than ten years, and in this capacity has written for several organizations including Scientific American, Nature and the Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates. His literary interests specifically lie in the history and philosophy of science. Email: ashutosh.jogalekar [at] gmail.com
by Ashutosh Jogalekar As the relentless march of AI in science continues, I found myself pondering the other day whether there ever would be a time when a human scientist would do the last human experiment, after which the machines take over. Of course, we don’t expect such a moment to be an abrupt one.…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar AI is collapsing barriers in scientific disciplines, most notably in math. An 87-year old conjecture named the Jacobian conjecture was recently solved with help from AI. An AI model solved another 80-year old conjecture, the distance conjecture. Many Erdős problems, named after the prolific late mathematician Paul Erdős, are swiftly succumbing to…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar This Fourth of July I find myself feeling more patriotic than I have in years. That may strike many people as strange, even tone-deaf, given the political moment we are living through. I understand the reaction. Yet the feeling is genuine, and it rests on two convictions that have only grown stronger…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar In 1966, Michael Polanyi began his book The Tacit Dimension with a sentence that every experimental scientist understands: “we can know more than we can tell.” Polanyi had been a chemist before he became a philosopher. He knew the difference between the written account of an experiment and the experience of doing…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar When people hear that we should empathize with our adversaries, the reaction is often uneasy. Empathy sounds like softness. It sounds like moral compromise, even capitulation. Why should we try to understand those who compete with us, oppose us, or even threaten us? The confusion lies in a simple mistake. Empathy is…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Earlier this week, European investigators concluded that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been killed with epibatidine, a toxin unknown in Russia’s natural environment and ordinarily found only in the skin of small, brilliantly colored frogs native to the rainforests of South America. If that conclusion is correct, a molecule shaped…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot Robert Kurson closes Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 with a deceptively simple scene. Decades into the twenty-first century,…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar There has long been a temptation in science to imagine one system that can explain everything. For a while, that dream belonged to physics, whose practitioners, armed with a handful of equations, could describe the orbits of planets and the spin of electrons. In recent years, the torch has been seized by…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar In every generation, young people find causes to champion. Today’s students rally against wars in foreign lands, the environmental record of large companies, the entanglement of Silicon Valley with the Pentagon and China, or the human rights policies of nations like China. These are important causes. In a free country like the…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia. By James Bradley By the time Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine was churning out colorized visions of a democratic, Christian China under the steady hand of Chiang Kai-shek, the die had already been cast. Not in Beijing or Nanjing but in Washington…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Eighty years ago on August 6, 1945, a blinding flash of light changed the world forever. The shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been with us ever since. Scientists struggled to make sense of the milennial force they had unleashed on the world. While science had always had some political implications, the…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar After World War II ended, there began a running debate between American scientists and the American government about how to properly wield the fearsome nuclear power that America had discovered and unleashed. The government believed that this power could be hoarded and used by the U.S. to play geopolitical games in which…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar There are physicists, and then there are physicists. There are engineers, and then there are engineers. There are government advisors, and then there are government advisors. And then there’s Dick Garwin. Richard L. Garwin, who his friends and colleagues called Dick, has died at the age of 97. He was a man…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for the people of a nation to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with their Executive, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature entitle them, a decent…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar AGI is in the air. Some think it’s right around the corner. Others think it will take a few more decades. Almost all who talk abut it agree that it applies to a superhuman AI which embodies all the unique qualities of human beings, only multiplied a thousand fold. Who are the…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Drugs for mental illness are notoriously hard. Human biology is complex, and the brain is even more complicated. We now have a good understanding of the basic mechanisms of neurotransmission, but the drugs we have for treating disorders like depression, anxiety and psychosis are often “spray and pray” approaches, either targeting the…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar In October last year, Charles Oppenheimer and I wrote a piece for Fast Company arguing that the only way to prevent an AI arms race is to open up the system. Drawing on a revolutionary early Cold War proposal for containing the spread of nuclear weapons, the Acheson-Lilienthal report, we argued that…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The Founding Fathers aren’t much in fashion among liberals these days. A good friend of mine has been trying to get a novel about Thomas Jefferson published for three years. He has approached more publishers than he can care to name, publishers of all sizes, reputations and political persuasions. He tells me…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The visionary physicist and statesman Niels Bohr once succinctly distilled the essence of science as “the gradual removal of prejudices”. Among these prejudices, few are more prominent than the belief that nation-states can strengthen their security by keeping critical, futuristic technology secret. This belief was dispelled quickly in the Cold War, as…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Bill Gates has long been one of the world’s leading optimists, and his new documentary, “What’s Next,” serves as a testament to his hopeful vision of the future. But what makes Gates’s optimism particularly compelling is that it is grounded not in dewy-eyed hopes and prayers but in logic, data, and an…