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December 2025

aerial view of river near houses and trees

My political views

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When I first had any views at all, I think I was in the second year of my engineering studies, in 2007, and decided I was a right-winger. Of course I understood very little of… 

teacup with tea

Heat capacity

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Someone asked me recently to name the thing I’ve been most grateful for in 2025. After giving it some thought, I realised it had to be the heat capacity of water. And not just for… 

A portrait of actor-politician Joseph Vijay in the glitch-art style.

Joel Mokyr, Gita Chadha, Lawrence Krauss, Joseph Vijay

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All that thinking about Joel Mokyr and his prescription to support society’s intellectual elite in order to ensure technological progress took me back to a talk Gita Chadha delivered in 2020, and to a dilemma… 

Mokyr hearts Nobel Prizes

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I don’t like Joel Mokyr’s history of progress and have written about that before. I also have a longer analysis and explanation of my issues coming soon in The Hindu. On December 8 I got… 

Tracking down energetic cosmic rays

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Once in a while, nature runs experiments that no human lab can match. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are a good example. Cosmic rays are fast, high energy particles from space that strike Earth’s atmosphere with energies… 

Acting and speaking

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I performed several times on stage in school, up to when I was 11 years old. I studies for around four years at a school in Tumkur where drama was part of the curriculum. Every… 

So you use AI to write…

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You’re probably using AI to write. Both ChatGPT and Google AI Studio prefer to construct their sentences in specific and characteristic ways and anyone who’s been a commissioning editor for at least a few years… 

AI slop clears peer-review

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Here’s an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5: This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in… 

A view of the Large Hadron Collider inside its tunnel.

Worlds between theory and experiment

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Once Isaac Newton showed that a single gravitational law plus his rules of dynamics could reproduce the orbits of planets that Johannes Kepler had predicted, explain tides on Earth, and predict that a comet that… 

An artist's concept of NISAR orbiting Earth. The satellite's mesh antenna and reflector are visible overhead, at the end of the boom.

Robbing NISAR to pay ISRO

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A.K. Anil Kumar, the director of ISRO’s Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (a.k.a. ISTRAC), has reportedly made some seriously misleading comments as part of his convocation address at a Maharishi University in Lucknow.* Kumar’s speech…