The calculus of creative discipline

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building. World-building is dull. World-building literalises the urge to invent. World-building gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). World-building numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it …

Disentangling entanglement

There has been considerable speculation if the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for physics, due to be announced at 2.30 pm IST on October 8, will include Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They’ve both made significant experimental contributions related to quantum information theory and the fundamental nature of quantum mechanics, including entanglement. Their work, …

Roundup of missed stories – May 23, 2015

I’ve missed writing/commenting on so many science papers/articles in the two weeks following the launch of The Wire. The concepts in many of them would’ve made fun explainers, some required a takedown or two, and one had surprising ethical and philosophical implications. I think it might be a bit late to write about them myself …

A closet of hidden phenomena

Science has been rarely counter-intuitive to our understanding of reality, and its elegant rationalism at every step of the way has been reassuring. This is why Bell’s theorem has been one of the strangest concepts of reality scientists have come across: it is hardly intuitive, hardly rational, and hardly reassuring. To someone interested in the bigger …

A closet of hidden phenomena

Science has been rarely counter-intuitive to our understanding of reality, and its elegant rationalism at every step of the way has been reassuring. This is why Bell’s theorem has been one of the strangest concepts of reality scientists have come across: it is hardly intuitive, hardly rational, and hardly reassuring. To someone interested in the bigger …