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 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…
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…
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…
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…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar This is the second in a series of posts about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and times. All the others can be found here. In the fall of 1922, after the New Mexico sojourn had strengthened his body and mind, Oppenheimer entered Harvard with an insatiable appetite for knowledge; in the words of…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar This is the first of a series of short pieces on J. Robert Oppenheimer. The others can all be found here. Popular interest in Oppenheimer’s life seems to have peaked this year with the upcoming release of Christopher Nolan’s mainstream film, “Oppenheimer”. Several books about Oppenheimer – and even a popular opera…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar In 1960, physicist Freeman Dyson published a paper in the journal Science describing how a technologically advanced civilization would make its presence known. Dyson’s assumption was that whether an advanced civilization signals its intelligence or hides it from us, it would not be able to hide the one thing that’s essential for…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Two weeks ago, outside a coffee shop near Los Angeles, I discovered a beautiful creature, a moth. It was lying still on the pavement and I was afraid someone might trample on it, so I gently picked it up and carried it to a clump of garden plants on the side. Before…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Like most people, I have been baffled, mystified, unimpressed and fascinated by chatGPT, the new AI engine that has taken the world by storm over the last few months. I cannot remember any time that a new AI development got so much attention, led to so much mockery and caused so much…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar “Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo and the Road to the Atomic Bomb”, by James M. Scott On the night of March 9, 1945, almost 300 B-29 bombers took off from Tinian Island near Japan. Over the next six hours, 100,000 civilians in Tokyo were burnt to death, more possibly…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in the U.S., and there’s an informal tradition on Thanksgiving to give thanks for all kinds of things in our lives. Certainly there’s plenty to be thankful for this year, especially for those of us whose lives and livelihoods haven’t been personally devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. But…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Freeman Dyson combined a luminous intelligence with a genuine sensitivity toward human problems that was unprecedented among his generation’s scientists. In his contributions to mathematics and theoretical physics he was second to none in the 20th century, but in the range of his thinking and writing he was probably unique. He made…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar It wasn’t very long ago that I was rather enamored with the New Atheist movement, of which the most prominent proponent was Richard Dawkins. I remember having marathon debates with a religious roommate of mine in graduate school about religion as the “root of all evil”, as the producers of a documentary…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Physicists writing books for the public have faced a longstanding challenge. Either they can write purely popular accounts that explain physics through metaphors and pop culture analogies but then risk oversimplifying key concepts, or they can get into a great deal of technical detail and risk making the book opaque to most…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar “Giving up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879”, by Noel Perrin In 1543, a small Chinese pirate sloop with two Portuguese arquebusiers on it sailed into Tanegashima island in Japan. The local feudal lord, Tokitaka, was so impressed when he saw one of the arquebusiers shoot a duck that he…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar As someone who has been interested in both classical music and the history of physics for a long time, I have been intrigued by comparison of the styles between the two art forms. I use the term “art form” for physics styles deliberately since most of the best physics that has been…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Scientists like to think that they are objective and unbiased, driven by hard facts and evidence-based inquiry. They are proud of saying that they only go wherever the evidence leads them. So it might come as a surprise to realize that not only are scientists as biased as non-scientists, but that they…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Like other parents, we were delighted when our daughter started walking a few months ago. But just like other parents, it’s not possible to remember when she went from scooting to crawling to speed-walking for a few steps before becoming unsteady again to steady walking. It’s not possible because no such sudden…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar From the age of eleven to the age of fifteen or so, my consummate interest in life was collecting insects and studying their behavior. In the single-minded pursuit of this activity I chose to ignore every ignominy, ranging from being chased by stray dogs and irate neighbors to enduring taunts hurled by…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Werner Heisenberg was on a boat with Niels Bohr and a few friends, shortly after he discovered his famous uncertainty principle in 1927. A bedrock of quantum theory, the principle states that one cannot determine both the velocity and the position of particles like electrons with arbitrary accuracy. Heisenberg’s discovery foretold of…