65 years of the BCS theory
Thanks to an arithmetic mistake, I thought 2022 was the 75th anniversary of the invention (or discovery?) of the BCS theory of superconductivity. It’s really the 65th anniversary, but since I’d worked myself up to…
July 2022
A ‘bold’ vision
‘Support Europe’s bold vision for responsible research assessment’, Nature editorial, July 27, 2022: The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, announced on 20 July and open for signatures on 28 September, is perhaps the most hopeful…
WordPress.com rolls back its botched ‘experiment’
So, WordPress.com has restored the family of premium plans that it had until April this year, and has done away with the controversial ‘Starter’ and ‘Pro’ plans. The announcement on the WordPress.com blog yesterday has…
Should ‘geniuses’ be paid extra?
A newsletter named Ideas Sleep Furiously had an essay propounding a “genius basic income” on May 28. Here are the first two paragraphs that capture a not-insignificant portion of the essay’s message: Professor Martin Hairer is one of…
The 5ftf blunder
Automattic owner Matt Mullenweg recently made a scene on Twitter when he called out GoDaddy as a “parasitic” organisation for profiting off of WordPress without making a sufficient number of contributions to the WordPress community…
A quantum theory of consciousness
We seldom have occasion to think about science and religion at the same time, but the most interesting experience I have had doing that came in October 2018, when I attended a conference called ‘Science…
Unless the West copies us, we’re irrelevant
We have become quite good at dismissing the more asinine utterances of our ministers and other learned people in terms of either a susceptibility to pseudoscience or, less commonly, a wilful deference to what we…
The Higgs boson and I
My first byline as a professional journalist (a.k.a. my first byline ever) was oddly for a tech story – about the advent of IPv6 internet addresses. I started writing it after 7 pm, had to…
25 years of Maldacena’s bridge
Twenty-five years go, in 1997, an Argentine physicist named Juan Martin Maldacena published what would become the most highly cited physics paper in history (more than 20,000 to date). In the paper, Maldacena described a…