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 A well known physicist turned venture capitalist asked on Twitter the other day why people seem to have a harder time understanding chemistry rather than physics or biology. Chemistry is by no means harder to understand than physics or biology, but it occupies a tricky middle ground between rigor and intuition, between…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The traveler comes to a divide. In front of him lies a forest. Behind him lies a deep ravine. He is sure about what he has seen but he isn’t sure what lies ahead. The mostly barren shreds of expectations or the glorious trappings of lands unknown, both are up for grabs…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The fall turned colors faster than ever before. The streets never saw any activity. The whole gambit of Prometheus hinged on a mere coin flip. Richard Albrook gingerly closed his book and took a look around. The café was almost deserted, college students and startup founders struggling to meet last minute deadlines,…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Victor Weisskopf (Viki to his friends) emigrated to the United States in the 1930s as part of the windfall of Jewish European emigre physicists which the country inherited thanks to Adolf Hitler. In many ways Weisskopf’s story was typical of his generation’s: born to well-to-do parents in Vienna at the turn of…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The Nobel Prizes in science will be announced this week. For more than a century the prizes have recognized high achievement in physics, chemistry and medicine. Some scientists crave the prizes so much that they get obsessed with them. A prominent, world-famous chemist once had lunch with my graduate school advisor. After…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar I met him at a Starbucks outside the Tower of London. It was pre-arranged. I had told him I was an independent blogger. He told me he preferred to talk to independent writers these days; the mainstream media was more trouble than what it was worth. It helped that I wrote for…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar One of my favorite quotes about artificial intelligence is often attributed to pioneering computer scientists Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky. To paraphrase: “The most important thing we have learned from three decades of AI research is that the hard things are easy and the easy things are hard”. In other words, we…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar A rare and happy coincidence today: The birthdays of both John Archibald Wheeler and Oliver Sacks. Wheeler was one of the most prominent physicists of the twentieth century. Sacks was one of the most prominent medical writers of his time. Both of them were great explorers, the first of the universe beyond…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The hour was late, but it was still hot. Frijoles Canyon loomed to my right, showcasing its surfeit of stratigraphic tuff and igneous ash layerings and ponderosa pines. I was about a hundred and fifty feet up on the mountain face in a reconstructed cave with a ceremonial kiva or well. The…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar A new theory seldom comes into the world like a fully formed, beautiful infant, ready to be coddled and embraced by its parents, grandparents and relatives. Rather, most new theories make their mark kicking and screaming while their fathers and grandfathers try to disown, ignore or sometimes even hurt them before accepting…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar In 1968, James Watson published “The Double Helix”, a personal account of the history of the race to discover the structure of DNA. The book was controversial and bracingly honest, a glimpse into the working style and personalities of great scientists like Francis Crick, Lawrence Bragg, Rosalind Franklin and Linus Pauling, warts…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Technocrats have had a mixed record in guiding major policies of the United States government. Perhaps the most famous technocrat of the postwar years was Robert McNamara, the longest serving secretary of defense who worked for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Before joining Kennedy’s cabinet McNamara was the president of Ford…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The crossing of disciplinary boundaries in science has brought with it a peculiar and ironic contradiction. On one hand, fields like computational biology, medical informatics and nuclear astrophysics have encouraged cross-pollination between disciplines and required the biologist to learn programming, the computer scientist to learn biology and the doctor to know statistics.…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar A few years ago, historian of science Steven Shapin had a review of Steven Gimbel's capsule biography of Einstein. The biography itself is quite readable, but Shapin also holds forth with some of his more general thoughts on the art of scientific biography and the treatment of famous scientific figures. He mulls…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Primitive science began when mankind looked upward at the sky and downward at the earth and asked why. Modern science began when Galileo and Kepler and Newton answered these questions using the language of mathematics and started codifying them into general scientific laws. Since then scientific discovery has been constantly driven by…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The day you were born, the world died. Died in glitter and grist, in skeletons and slogans. Scenic Riverside Drive which bequeathed you to us. Sparkling New York lent us its sordid dreams To trample underfoot, like so many lost souls. You were born of a merchant; Of loathsome success, Of a…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The sun was setting on a cloudless sky, the gulls screeching in the distance. The air was bracing and clear. Land rose from the blue ocean, a vague apparition on the horizon. He breathed the elixir of pure evening air in and heaved a sigh of relief. This would help the godforsaken…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar On September 1, 1939, the leading journal of physics in the United States, Physical Review, carried two remarkable papers. One was by a young professor of physics at Princeton University named John Wheeler and his mentor Niels Bohr. The other was by a young postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley,…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Philosopher John Locke's spirited defense of the natural rights of man should apply to all men and women, not just one's favorite factions. When the British left India in 1947, they left a complicated legacy behind. On one hand, Indians had suffered tremendously under oppressive British rule for more than 250 years.…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar We live in a fractured age when many seem to be convinced that their beliefs are right, and that they can never agree with the other side on anything to any degree. Science has always been the best antidote against this bias, because while political truths are highly subjective and subject to…