Tag: science

The Burden of a Molecule

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Poison dart frogs (Image: ABdragons.com)

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 in one of the most intricate ecosystems on Earth has completed a journey that ends not in the forest, nor in the laboratory, but in a prison cell. For Putin’s Russia, this is one more marker on the road to political assassination using chemical and biological weapons.

Long before laboratories named it, indigenous communities of the Amazon understood through long experience that certain tiny, extraordinarily bright and beautiful frogs carried extraordinary power in their skin. The knowledge was practical and restrained. It served hunting, survival, and continuity. It was part of a relationship with the living forest in which danger and respect were inseparable. Nothing in that knowledge pointed toward geopolitics or assassination. The molecule existed only within a web of life that had shaped it.

Centuries later, science encountered the same substance and read it differently. At the National Institutes of Health, the chemist John Daly devoted decades to the study of amphibian alkaloids, following faint chemical traces through repeated expeditions, careful collections, and patient analysis. His work was not driven by persistence, by the belief that small natural molecules could reveal deep biological truths. From thousands of specimens and years of attention emerged epibatidine, a molecule isolated from the skin of a poison dart frog endemic to Ecuador and Peru: a structure modest in size yet immense in biological effect, binding human receptors with an affinity evolution had refined without intention. Daly turned into something of a folk hero whose findings resonated beyond the halls of chemistry. Read more »

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

An Embodied Mathematics

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

The Stepped Reckoner, a calculating machine invented by philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1674

Is mathematics created or discovered? For over two thousand years, that question has puzzled philosophers and mathematicians alike. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates encourages an uneducated boy to “discover” a geometrical truth simply by answering a series of guided questions. To Plato, this demonstrated that mathematical knowledge is innate, that the soul recalls truths it has always known. The intuitionists of the early twentieth century, however, rejected this idea of eternal forms. For thinkers like Poincaré and Brouwer, mathematics was not revelation but construction: an activity of the human mind unfolding in time.

The debate continues today in an unexpected new arena. As artificial intelligences start to generate proofs, conjectures, and even entire branches of formal reasoning, we are prompted to ask again: what does it mean to do mathematics? Current systems excel at symbol manipulation and pattern matching, but are they truly thinking in any meaningful way, or just rearranging signs? The deeper question is how humans do mathematics. What happens in the brain when a mathematician recognizes a pattern, intuitively sees a relation, or invents a new kind of number?

In what follows, I’ll trace that question from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and then to the newest foundations of mathematics. We’ll see that mathematical invention may be the natural expression of the brain’s recursive, embodied intelligence, and that this perspective could transform how we think about both mathematics and AI. Read more »

Monday, September 15, 2025

Little Cousin Bernie Swears He Can Fly Like Buck Rogers — The Memoir of a Free-Range Professor Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

Buck Rogers wearing his flying belt. Vintage comic strip panel.

Eight weeks have passed since I wrote about my Cousin Bernie—and how, posthumously, he adds to my own memories of him. As readers may remember from my last offering, Cousin Bernie’s widow, Joan Hamilton Morris, sent me the pages of an incomplete memoir her late husband pecked out on a vintage typewriter in an adult education class he took after retiring as a university professor of psychology and mathematics.

If Cousin Bernie were alive today he would be 102. Those pages of memoir chapters, some more worn than others, remain in a place of honor, tucked into a corner of my own writing table. I feel that “Cousin Joanie,” as I call his widow, sent them to me for safekeeping—and for presentation to the world. Originally I thought I could do this in one or two chapters. A deeper read has revealed a surprising amount of insight. Here is my fourth take on my cousin, who fascinates me despite his evergreen persona as a nerdy, chubby, lost boy from Brooklyn. There will be a fifth offering and probably a sixth. If it seems Bernie is taking over my memoir, I am fine with this. I have written a lot about my mother’s side of the family. Now it is my father’s family’s turn.  And what better way to bring them into the light, than through Cousin Bernie?

What follows is Cousin Bernie, Part Four. I’ve only edited it slightly, less so I think than his Adult Education teacher. So far, my minor editing has provoked no lightning bolts from the heavens. I have discovered another Bernie, a child who believed he could fly like his comic strip hero.

“I was eight years old, and my sister, Gertie, six. We had just been transplanted to Bridgeport, Connecticut from Brooklyn, New York. My father, a home painter and decorator, felt that he could do better in terms of finding work in a smaller city.

“Here, a whole new set of stimuli presented itself: A Benjamin Franklin stove in the kitchen, a gas water heater in the bathroom, which had to be lighted so we could bathe, and a coal bin on the back porch. There was a scuttle for bringing in coal for the stove. The Saturday Sabbath meal preparations—gefilte fish, stewed chicken and beef, challahs, cookies and pies—began as early as Wednesday night. The stove was banked and allowed to go out on Saturday night.

“We slept as the stove died down and, on Sunday mornings, my sister and I would climb into my parents’ big bed. Pop got up wearing his union suit, put on a robe, removed the ashes, kindled a new fire in the stove and came back to bed with us for my reading of the Sunday comics. My sister, Gertie, pointed to each speech bubble, as I read them. It seemed to me that Andy Gump’s nose or chin was strange looking. I disliked it when the bubbles were long. But it was here in the Sunday comics that I encountered the adventures of ‘Buck Rodgers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.’  Read more »

Thursday, August 14, 2025

The Social Origin of Free Will

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

In 2023, Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s bestseller ‘Determined’ declared free will to be a complete illusion. Sapolsky gathered a wealth of data from neuroscience to quantum mechanics in an effort to deliver a final knockout blow to our intuitive ideas of freedom. He then explores a wide range of ethical and social issues where our questionable notions of freedom have led to misguided and often inhumane policies and practices. Since its publication, the book continues to attract criticism for its deterministic stance. Experts from many fields have engaged in this lively discussion.

Watching the debate unfold shows that while we have strong ideas about what free will isn’t, we lack a clear understanding of what freedom actually could be. We agree that whatever it is, it would be incompatible with both mechanical determinism and total randomness. We also think that free will is connected to that vaguely self-conscious feeling that we are the originators of our actions. If free will exists, it probably exists in a middle ground that isn’t too deterministic nor too random. But what exactly is it?

Neuroscience may not be as conclusive about the end of free will as Sapolsky suggests, but it has not been particularly effective in producing alternative explanations. Science generally depends on deterministic approaches — such as reproducible experiments — to test hypotheses that can be proven false. It might be, as critics like Jessica Riskin argue, that science is the wrong place to seek an understanding of free will. However, a potential way forward could come from an unexpected source. In the early nineteenth century, philosopher G.W.F. Hegel developed a theory of freedom, defining it as a result of human social interactions. Read more »

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

I Understand You’ve Been Running From the Man

Posted on by Dilip D'Souza

by Dilip D’Souza

Superimposed human and sloth feet
Superimposed impressions of human and sloth feet (from the Bustos paper)

Many years ago, I spent a lazy evening in the Parque Balvanero Vargas in Limón, Costa Rica. I use that word deliberately, because I was lulled into laziness by the animal I was watching. In a diary I kept about that trip are these lines: “A small sloth is hanging upside down and munching on the leaves, a cat-sized light brown mat of hair. After a while he turns and comes near enough to touch. That appears to startle him, though his surprise is as slow and measured as his movements.”

That charming experience came back to mind some years after that, when I read a paper about giant sloths. A team of scientists examined a series of fossil sloth footprints in the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. They dated these prints to 11,000 years ago, that dating a feat in itself for various reasons. But their further inferences from these ancient impressions in the clay were even more impressive, and their paper tells that story. (David Bustos et al, Footprints preserve terminal Pleistocene hunt? Human-sloth interactions in North America, ScienceAdvances, 25 April 2018.)

Among the prints the sloths left were several human ones. Examining them closely, the scientists concluded that these humans were probably stalking and harrying a giant sloth; that the animal eventually stopped to face its tormentors; that the humans may have then run up to throw spears at the sloth. That is, these tracks in White Sands may be telling the story of a long-ago hunt. And if that’s so, and if humans did regularly hunt those animals, they may be part of why giant sloths are now extinct.

All fascinating, yet the reason all this came back to mind this week is still another paper. Or two, actually.

Some background: In the 1970s, RM Alexander studied fossil “trackways”, like the one in White Sands. He measured stride lengths – the distance between successive impressions of the same foot – of the animals that had left footprints. The question he wanted to answer was, how fast did these ancient animals move? More to the point, could he estimate that speed from just this fossil record of footprints? Read more »

Monday, June 9, 2025

Richard L. Garwin (1928-2025): Force of Nature

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

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 whose soul imbibed technical brilliance and whose life threaded the narrow corridor between Promethean power and principled restraint. A scientist of prodigious intellect and unyielding moral seriousness, his career spanned the detonations of the Cold War and the dimming of the Enlightenment spirit in American public life. He was, without fanfare or affectation, the quintessential citizen-scientist—at once a master of equations and a steward of consequence. When you needed objective scientific advice on virtually any technological or defense-related question, you asked Dick Garwin, even when you did not like the advice. Especially when you did not like it. And yet he was described as “the most influential scientist you have never heard of”, legendary in the world of physics and national security but virtually unknown outside it.

He was born in Cleveland in 1928 to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and quickly distinguished himself as a student whose mind moved with the inexorable clarity of first principles. His father was an electronics technician and high school science teacher who moonlighted as a movie projectionist. As a young child Garwin was already taking things apart, with the promise of reassembling them. By the age of 21 he had earned his Ph.D. under Enrico Fermi, who—legend has it—once remarked that Garwin was the only true genius he had ever met. This was not idle flattery. After Fermi, Dick Garwin might be the closest thing we have had to a universal scientist who understood the applied workings of every branch of physics and technology. There was no system whose principles he did not comprehend, whether mechanical, electrical or thermodynamic, no machine that he could not fix, no calculation that fazed him. Just two years after getting his Ph.D., Garwin would design the first working hydrogen bomb, a device of unprecedented and appalling potency, whose test, dubbed “Ivy Mike,” would usher in a new and even graver chapter of the nuclear age. Read more »

Monday, March 17, 2025

Why even a “superhuman AI” won’t destroy humanity

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Photo credit

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 most interesting people writing and thinking about AGI whose words we should heed? Although leaders of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic suck up airtime, I would put much more currency in the words of Kevin Kelly, a superb philosopher of technology who has been writing about AI and related topics for decades; among his other accomplishments, he is the founding editor of Wired magazine, and his book “Out of Control” was one of the key inspirations for the Matrix movies. A few years ago he wrote a very insightful piece in Wired about four reasons why he believes fears of an AI that will “take over humanity” are overblown. He casts these reasons in the form of misconceptions about AI which he then proceeds to question and dismantle. The whole thing should be dusted off and is eminently worth reading.

The first and second misconceptions: Intelligence is a single dimension and is “general purpose”.

This is a central point that often gets completely lost when people talk about AI. Most applications of machine intelligence that we have so far are very specific, but when AGI proponents hold forth they are talking about some kind of overarching single intelligence that’s good at everything. The media almost always mixes up multiple applications of AI in the same sentence, as in “AI did X, so imagine what it would be like when it could do Y”; lost is the realization that X and Y could refer to very different dimensions of intelligence, or significantly different in any case. As Kelly succinctly puts it, “Intelligence is a combinatorial continuum. Multiple nodes, each node a continuum, create complexes of high diversity in high dimensions.” Even humans are not good at optimizing along every single of these dimensions, so it’s unrealistic to imagine that AI will. In other words, intelligence is horizontal, not vertical. The more realistic vision of AI is thus what it already has been; a form of augmented, not artificial, intelligence that helps humans with specific tasks, not some kind of general omniscient God-like entity that’s good at everything. Some tasks that humans do will indeed be replaced by machines, but in the general scheme of things humans and machines will have to work together to solve the tough problems. Read more »

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

An ingenious new treatment for schizophrenia

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Molecular structures of xanomeline and trospium chloride. Note the positive charge (indicated by a +) on trospium chloride that restricts its actions to outside the brain.

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 wrong mechanisms of dysfunction or targeting too many or too few. Antidepressants often stop working. Anti-anxiety medication can do little more than sedate. And many antipsychotic drugs have prohibitive side effects.

Nevertheless, there are rare cases when genuine breakthroughs occur in the field. Thorazine famously emptied out the cruel mental asylums of the 1950s and 1960s. L-DOPA provided genuine benefits for Parkinson’s patients. And there is no denying that the new generation of antidepressants works at least occasionally for a subset of patients. Last year one such potential breakthrough seemed to fly under the radar of breathless news dominated by politics and social issues. If its promise holds up, it could herald a new kind of treatment for schizophrenia.

As is well known, schizophrenia is a serious form of psychosis that is characterized by disordered thinking, hallucinations and impaired speech and expression. The disease profoundly impacts the quality of life of afflicted individuals, including being able to sustain social relationships and professional goals. In severe cases, as made infamous by the case of Michael Laudor, even high-functioning schizophrenics can become a fatal threat to themselves or others. Estimates of the prevalence of schizophrenia in the United States range from 0.25%-0.64%.

All drugs work by blocking or improving the function of proteins or receptors. Receptors in the brain include those that regulate the function of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. Neuropharmacological drug discovery starts with identifying these receptors and then discovering molecules that selectively inhibit or activate them. For instance, most antidepressants are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) which increase the concentration of serotonin by blocking its re-absorbption and improving a sense of well-being. Read more »

Thursday, October 3, 2024

The KPI Μachine

Posted on by Eleni Petrakou

by Eleni Petrakou

Decorative artwork. Various types that look related to academia, industry, science and the church with ominous and cartoonish appearances. Art deco and dystopian undertones.
From the webcomic Dresden Codak

Let this text be a string of anecdotes this columnist has been exposed to, mostly through her work in research and academia. Said work was spread in space and time. The anecdotes, however, come from the western world and its sphere of influence.

*

The first-year student is asking me what to do about the courses by those lecturers who don’t know how to answer her questions.

Five minutes later she’s asking the same thing again.

In the meantime she explained that she’s aware many students lack the background necessary for higher education and of the reasons why. And that yes, she knows she can find lectures from elsewhere online.

*

The senior lecturer is showing me photos of past exam answer sheets. It is clear that some science students don’t know lower high school math.

All of them passed the exams thanks to their marks for the other half of the questions, graded by his co-teaching colleague.

*

Minor detail in Guardian article a few months ago. A seasoned professor says that the quality of studies is going down and for the first time ever she had to fail more than 10% of students.

*

The friend who quit academia is listening to me being concerned about grade inflation. She comforts me by adding that at one university, on her first day at work, she was made to sign an agreement that she wouldn’t ever fail more than 15% of students. Read more »

Thursday, August 22, 2024

Whispers of the dragon

Posted on by Eleni Petrakou

by Eleni Petrakou

Detail of painting in medieveal style. A person with rich elegant clothes, seen from the bust down, is holding a small dragon from a leash in the fashion of a pet.
Detail from “The Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany” by Jean Bourdichon, c. 1505.

During this Chinese New Year celebrations, this columnist was very surprised to realize that what dragons were is not really common knowledge.

Are you one of those people who don’t know? I’m glad you are here. Already know? A refresher is always pleasant on this particular topic.

Thinking of it, I was probably spoiled. I happened to get exposed to the answer before I thought of the actual question; all by reading Carl Sagan’s stunning “The Dragons of Eden” at a young age.

But, notwithstanding, I mean, what could dragons be other than dinosaurs.

*

For millennia, unrelated civilizations around the globe have been painting dragons at every chance they get. Ever since we found out about dinosaurs we’ve been doing the same with them. Kids are enamored. Toys, cartoons, grown-up science articles abound. It’s impossible to go a single day without a dinosaur, in some artistic form or other, entering our field of vision. Today I saw three. Plus two dragon tattoos.

The obvious physical similarity between the two creatures probably renders any further arguments redundant. (But it’s interesting to add that one ingredient in traditional chinese medicine used to be dragon bones; and it was powdered dinosaur fossils.) The question is not “whether” but “how on earth”. How was it possible for humankind to retain the image of creatures separated from it by tens of millions years?

Although I don’t know the answer, “The Dragons of Eden” looked at a few more hints of this peculiar survival in our species’ collective memory bank. They mostly have to do with snakes, the “evil lizards’” direct descendants. Read more »

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

The Wormhole Fiasco

Posted on by Eleni Petrakou

by Eleni Petrakou

Front page of journal Nature featuring the mentioned article

It’s late 2022. Scientists announce the creation of a spacetime wormhole. A flurry of articles and press releases of the highest caliber spread the news. Involved researchers call the achievement as exciting as the Higgs boson discovery. Pulitzer-winning journalists report on the “unprecedented experiment”. US government advisory panels hear it is a poster child for doing “foundational physics using quantum information systems”. Media the world over are on fire.

All the while, the scientific community is watching, dumbfounded.

Because, of course, nobody had created any spacetime wormhole.

*

Now that all the rage is well gone, it’s probably worthwhile to revisit that episode with the proverbial hindsight.

Specifically, the events of November ’22 kick off with an article in Nature detailing the creation of a “holographic wormhole” in Google’s quantum labs. On the same day, the prescheduled publicity by respected science outlets is crazy –the announcements by participating elite universities don’t hurt either– and sure enough the story quickly makes headlines all across muggle media.

To keep things in context: in case you are wondering if wormholes are something whose existence would shake a large part of what physics we know and, even if they exist, we might be technological centuries away from their handling, you are right. This is why all experts not connected to the study reacted with unbridled skepticism. Read more »

Monday, June 3, 2024

Sing, Mate, Die: The 2024 Cicadas Rally

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

“…they came out of little holes in the ground, and did eat up the green things, and made such a constant yelling noise as made the woods ring of them, and ready to deafen the hearers…” —William Bradford, Massachusetts, 1633

Cicada

If you missed the totality last month when the moon fully obscured the sun and can’t wait until August 23, 2044, for the next total solar eclipse, don’t despair. There are still some very good reasons to rent a strange Airbnb in a strange county you’ve never visited to witness another rare event in nature: the emergence of a trillion cicadas. If you’re inclined to get the best seats for this event, you might want to start looking at flights to Illinois and Iowa, where the bugs will really take over.

For those who don’t follow cicadas, this year we’re seeing what amounts to a Sturgis rally or Woodstock for insects: a hell of a lot of showing off, really loud music, lots of sex, and truly living for the moment. Periodical cicadas, as they’re called, live underground as nymphs for years, and then spend only a few weeks above ground as adults after they’ve emerged to mate. There are two types of periodical cicadas, one which emerges every thirteen years, and one which emerges every seventeen years. What’s exciting this year—if you’re an entomologist—is that two adjacent broods, one from the seventeen-year gang and one from the thirteeners, have synched up so they are both emerging the same year. The last time this happened was in 1803.

This being America, there’s even a clumsy portmanteau to describe making a special trip to hear the insects: cicada-cation. Read more »

Monday, May 6, 2024

Snake Oil, Vitamins, and Self-Help

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Vitamins and self-help are part of the same optimistic American psychology that makes some of us believe we can actually learn the guitar in a month and de-clutter homes that resemble 19th-century general stores. I’m not sure I’ve ever helped my poor old self with any of the books and recordings out there promising to turn me into a joyful multi-billionaire and miraculously develop the sex appeal to land a Margot Robbie. But I have read an embarrassing number of books in that category with embarrassingly little to show for it. And I’ve definitely wasted plenty of money on vitamins and supplements that promise the same thing: revolutionary improvement in health, outlook, and clarity of thought.

On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with self-help. I think one of the most glorious and heartening visions in the world is that of an extremely overweight man or woman jogging down the side of the road in athletic clothing and running shoes. When I see such a person, I say a little atheist prayer hoping that a year from now they have succeeded with their fitness regime and are gliding down the Boston Marathon, fifty pounds lighter. You never know how they decided to buy a pair of running shoes and begin what has to be an uncomfortable start toward fitness. But if it was a popular book or inspirational YouTube video that nudged them in that direction, then glory be!

The same goes with alcoholics and drug addicts. Chances are, millions are bucked up by a bit of self-help advice from a recovering addict or alcoholic, an inspirational quote they read, and even certain supplements to help their bodies heal from abuse.

But so much of what’s sold as life-changing does little more than eat at a person’s finances in little $25 increments of shiny books and shiny bottles. Sometimes the robberies are bigger—thousands of dollars in the form of fancy seminars, retreats, or involved online classes. There are thousands of versions of snake oil, and there will always be people lining up for some version of it. Read more »

Monday, April 22, 2024

Physical Analogies and Field Theory

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

In popular media, physics often comes up for one of two competing reasons. The first is to introduce a touch of mysticism without labeling it as such. Whether it’s Carl Sagan talking about our bones as stardust, or Lisa Randall suggesting some extra dimensions of space, these pronouncements are often presented to evoke the listener’s primal awe—an ancient and venerable form of entertainment. The second reason is just as venerable, and often as entertaining. Sometimes, physics just gets results. Think of MacGuyver in MacGuyver, Mark Watney in The Martian, or those stunt coordinators in Mythbusters—characters whose essential pragmatism couldn’t be further from the tremulous epiphanies of the theorists.

Dramatically, the esoteric and the everyday can seem like opposites, and many fictional plots seem to advise against bringing them together. Mad scientists, those cautionary anti-heroes like Drs. Frankenstein and Manhattan, are often characters who both stumble upon hidden truths and put them to terrible use. But in the real world of physics, it’s common to forge connections between the realms.

Physical analogies, examples that link unfamiliar physics to everyday experience, are important in forging such connections. Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, a new book by the physicist Matt Strassler, is an impressive attempt to explain contemporary physics using little math but many analogies. Strassler mainly goes against the archetype of the theoretical physicist as the purveyor of primal awe. Instead, he’s a practiced teacher, more interested in accuracy than amazement. In seven concise sections—Motion, Mass, Waves, Fields, Quantum, Higgs, and Cosmos—he covers the basics of physics with minimal fuss, but with a charmingly dorky earnestness. Read more »

Monday, March 18, 2024

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

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Jack Dunitz during a student outing at Caltech in 1948 (Image credit: OSU Special Collections)

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 long life of 98 years Dunitz inspired chemists across varied branches of chemistry. Many of his papers inspired me when I was in college and graduate school, and if the mark of a good scientific paper is that you find yourself regularly quoting it without even realizing it, then Dunitz’s papers have few rivals.

Two rare qualities in particular made Dunitz stand out: simple thinking that extended across chemistry, and clarity of prose. He was the master of the semi-quantitative argument. Most scientists, especially in this day and age, are specialists who rarely venture outside their narrow areas of expertise. And it is even rarer to find scientists – in any field – who wrote with the clarity that Dunitz did. When he was later asked in an interview what led to his fondness for exceptionally clear prose, his answer was simple: “I was always interested in literature, and therefore in clear expression.” Which is as good a case for coupling scientific with literary training as I can think of.

Dunitz who was born in Glasgow and got his PhD there in 1947 had both the talent and the good fortune to have been trained by three of the best chemists and crystallographers of the 20th century: Linus Pauling, Dorothy Hodgkin and Leopold Ruzicka, all Nobel Laureates. In my personal opinion Dunitz himself could have easily qualified for a kind of lifetime achievement Nobel himself. While being a generalist, Dunitz’s speciality was the science and art of x-ray crystallography, and few could match his acumen in the application of this tool to structural chemistry. Read more »

Monday, September 25, 2023

Grand Observations: Darwin and Fitzroy

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Captain Robert Fitzroy

One of the artifacts of modern American culture is the digital clutter that crowds our minds and crowds our days. I’m old enough to have grown up in the era before even answering machines and the glorification of fast information. It’s an era that’s hard to remember because like most Americans, I’ve gotten lost in the sea of immediate “content” and the vast body of information at our fingertips and on our phones. While it’s a delicious feeling to be able to access almost every bit of knowledge acquired by humankind over the last few thousand years, I suspect the resulting mental clutter has in many ways made us just plain dumber. Our little brains can absorb and process a lot of information but digesting the massive amount of data available nowadays has some of our minds resembling the storage units of hoarders: an unholy mess of useless facts and impressions guarded in a dark space with a lost key.

If you consider who our “wise men” and “wise women” are these days, they sure seem dumber than men and women of past centuries. I guess some of them are incredibly clever when it comes to computers, material science, genetic engineering, and the like. But when it comes to big-picture thinking, even the most glorified billionaires just seem foolish. And our batch of politicians even more so.

It’s hard to know the shape and content of the human mind in our millions of years of development but the story goes that we’ve advanced in consciousness almost every century, with major advances in periods such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That may be true for certain individuals but as a whole, it seems we drove right on past the bus stop of higher consciousness with our digital orgy and embryonic embrace of artificial intelligence. Are we losing the wonderful feeling, agency, and utility of uncluttered minds? Read more »

Monday, September 4, 2023

September 1, 1939: A tale of two papers

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

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 a paper that appeared in the September 1, 1939 issue of the “Physical Review”, the leading American journal of physics.

The paper had been published by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student, Hartland Snyder, at the University of California at Berkeley. Oppenheimer was then a 35-year-old professor and had been teaching at Berkeley for ten years. He was widely respected in the world of physics for his brilliant mind and remarkable breadth of interests ranging from left-wing politics to Sanskrit. He had already made important contributions to nuclear and particle physics. Over the years Oppenheimer had collected around him a coterie of talented students. Hartland Snyder was regarded as the best mathematician of the group.

Hartland Snyder (Image credit: Niels Bohr Library and Archives)

Oppenheimer and Snyder’s paper was titled “On Continued Gravitational Contraction”. It tackled the question of what happens when a star runs out of the material whose nuclear reactions make it shine. It postulated a bizarre, wondrous, wholly new object in the universe that must be created when massive stars die. Today we know that object as a black hole. Oppenheimer and Snyder’s paper was the first to postulate it (although an Indian physicist named Bishveshwar Datt had tackled a similar case before without explicitly considering a black hole). The paper is now regarded as one of the seminal papers of 20th century physics.

But when it was published, it sank like a stone. Read more »

Monday, January 23, 2023

A horror show of technological and moral failure

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A B-29 dropping bombs over Japan. The drift in the bombs because of the jet stream is apparent.

“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 than in any six hour period in history. James Scott’s “Black Snow” tells the story of this horrific event which was both a technological and a moral failure. It is also the story of how moral failures can result from technological failures, a lesson that we should take to heart in an age when we understand technology less and less and morality perhaps even lesser.

The technological failure in Scott’s story is the failure of the most expensive technological project in World War 2, the B-29 bomber. The United States spent more than $3 billion on developing this wonder of modern technology, more than on the Manhattan Project. Soaring at 30,000 feet like an impregnable iron eagle, the B-29 was supposed to drop bombs with pinpoint precision on German and Japanese factories producing military hardware.

This precision bombing was considered not only a technological achievement but a moral one. Starting with Roosevelt’s plea in 1939 after the Germans invaded Poland and started the war, it was the United States’s policy not to indiscriminately bomb civilians. The preferred way, the moral way, was to do precision bombing during daytime rather than carpet bombing during nighttime. When the British, led by Arthur “Butcher” Harris, resorted to nighttime bombing using incendiaries, it was a moral watershed. Notoriously, in Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1944, the British took advantage of the massive, large-scale fires caused by incendiaries to burn tens of thousands of civilians to death. Read more »

Monday, November 28, 2022

A Science Thanksgiving

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The pistol shrimp (Image credit: Wired)

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 I thought I would do something different this year. Instead of being thankful for life’s usual blessings, how about being thankful for some specific facts of nature and the universe that are responsible for our very existence and make it wondrous? Being employed and healthy and surrounded by family and friends is excellent, but none of that would be possible without the amazing unity and diversity of life and the universe. So without further ado and in no particular order, I present an entirely personal selection of ten favorites for which I am eternally thankful.

I am thankful for the value of the resonance level energy of the excited state of carbon-12: carbon-12 which is the basis of all organic life on earth is formed in stars through the reaction of beryllium-8 with helium-4. The difference in energies between the starting materials (beryllium + helium) and carbon is only about 4%. If this difference had been even slightly higher, the unstable beryllium-8 would have disappeared long before it had transmuted into carbon-12, making life impossible. Read more »

Monday, October 31, 2022

What Freeman Dyson taught the world

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

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 seminal contributions to science, advised the U.S government on critical national security issues and won almost every award for his contributions that a scientist could. His understanding of human problems found expression in elegant prose dispersed in an autobiography and in essays and book reviews in the New Yorker and other sources. Along with being a great scientist he was also a cherished friend and family man who raised six children. He was one of a kind. Those of us who could call him a friend, colleague or mentor were blessed.

Now there is a volume commemorating his remarkable mind from MIT Press that is a must-read for anyone who wants to appreciate the sheer diversity of ideas he generated and lives he touched. From spaceships powered by exploding nuclear bombs to the eponymous “Dyson spheres” that could be used by advanced alien civilizations to capture energy from their suns, from his seminal work in quantum electrodynamics to his unique theories for the origins of life, from advising the United States government to writing far-ranging books for the public that were in equal parts science and poetry, Dyson’s roving mind roamed across the physical and human universe. All these aspects of his life and career are described by a group of well-known scientists and science writers, including his son, George and daughter, Esther. Edited by the eminent physicist and historian of science David Kaiser, the volume brings it all together.  I myself was privileged to write a chapter about Dyson’s little-known but fascinating foray into the origins of life. Read more »