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 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…
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Carl Woese’s integrated view of biology should help temper the application of technology to biological understanding There seems to be no end to biology’s explosive progress. Genomes can now be read, edited and rewritten with unprecedented scope, individual neurons can now be studied in both space and time, the dynamics of the…