To fight Trumpism, liberals should embrace the Founding Fathers

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…

What Would An AI Treaty Between Countries Look Like?

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…

Bridging Innovation and Empathy: Bill Gates’s “What’s Next?”

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…

What are “forever chemicals” and why are they a concern?

by Ashutosh Jogalekar Recently the Biden administration has clamped down on so-called “forever chemicals” which are thought to potentially cause diseases in human beings and damage to the environment. As with any molecule, the basic chemical structure and properties of these compounds are responsible for their function. In this video I break down some of…

Israel, Gaza, and Robert McNamara’s Lessons for War and Peace

by Ashutosh Jogalekar Once again the world faces death and destruction, and once again it asks questions. The horrific assaults by Hamas on October 7 last year and the widespread bombing by the Israeli government in Gaza raise old questions of morality, law, history and national identity. We have been here before, and if history…

How do you solve a problem like nukes?

by Ashutosh Jogalekar As the saying goes, if you believe only fascists guard borders, then you will ensure that only fascists will guard borders. The same principle applies to scientists working on nuclear weapons. If you believe that only Strangelovian warmongers work on nuclear weapons, you run the risk of ensuring that only such characters…

Jack Dunitz (1923-2021): Chemist and writer extraordinaire

by Ashutosh Jogalekar Every once in a while there is a person of consummate achievement in a field, a person who while widely known to workers in that field is virtually unknown outside it and whose achievements should be known much better. One such person in the field of chemistry was Jack Dunitz. Over his…

Remembering Leo Szilard: A Conversation with William Lanouette

by Ashutosh Jogalekar Bill Lanouette is the author of “Genius in the Shadows“, the definitive biography of the Hungarian-born American physicist Leo Szilard. Szilard was one of the most creative and far-seeing minds of the 20th century, imagining before anyone else both the reality of nuclear weapons and the seismic political and social changes that…

The case for American scientific patriotism

by Ashutosh Jogalekar John von Neumann emigrated from Hungary in 1933 and settled in Princeton, NJ. During World War 2, he contributed a key idea to the design of the plutonium bomb at Los Alamos. After the war he became a highly sought-after government consultant and did important work kickstarting the United States’s ICBM program.…

Artists and Craftsmen In Science Writing

by Ashutosh Jogalekar There are two kinds of science writers which I will call “artists” and “craftsmen”. Since I might face the opprobrium of both groups by attaching these labels to them, and especially because the two categories may overlap considerably, let me elaborate a little. Artists are big on literary science writing; craftsmen are…

September 1, 1939: A tale of two papers

by Ashutosh Jogalekar Scientific ideas can have a life of their own. They can be forgotten, lauded or reworked into something very different from their creators’ original expectations. Personalities and peccadilloes and the unexpected, buffeting currents of history can take scientific discoveries in very unpredictable directions. One very telling example of this is provided by…

Oppenheimer VIII: The House of Science

by Ashutosh Jogalekar This is the eighth in a series of essays on the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer. All the others can be found here. After his shameful security hearing, many of Oppenheimer’s colleagues thought he was a broken man, “like a wounded animal” as one colleague said. But Freeman Dyson, a…

Oppenheimer VII: “Scorpions in a bottle”

by Ashutosh Jogalekar This is the seventh in a series of essays on the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer. All the others can be found here. The Bohrian paradox of the bomb – the manifestation of unlimited destructive power making future wars impossible – played into the paradoxes of Robert Oppenheimer’s life after…

Oppenheimer VI: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”

by Ashutosh Jogalekar This is the sixth in a series of essays on the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer. All the others can be found here. Colonel Leslie Groves, son of an Army chaplain who held discipline sacrosanct above anything else in life, had finished fourth in his class at West Point and…

Oppenheimer V: “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture”

by Ashutosh Jogalekar This is the fifth in a series of essays on the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer. All the others can be found here. Between December, 1941, when the United States entered the Second World War and July, 1945, when the war ended and two revolutionary weapons had been used against…

Oppenheimer IV: “Nim nim man”

by Ashutosh Jogalekar This is the fourth in a series of posts about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and times. All the others can be found here. Robert Oppenheimer, said Hans Bethe, “created the greatest school of theoretical physics America has ever known.” Coming from Bethe, a physicist of legendary stature who received the Nobel Prize…

Oppenheimer III: “Oppenheimer seemed to me, right from the beginning, a very gifted man.”

by Ashutosh Jogalekar This is the third in a series of posts about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and times. All the others can be found here. In 1925, there was no better place to do experimental physics than Cambridge, England. The famed Cavendish Laboratory there has been created in 1874 by funds donated by a…