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 I’d had at the time involving Lawrence Krauss. Chadha’s proposed resolution to
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 more occasion to critique his thinking over his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, after
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 far beyond what even the most powerful particle accelerators can routinely create. Most particles
Writing prompt: Have you ever performed on stage or given a speech? 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 year we’d
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 will find the signs of its influence hard to miss, even if
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 for a moment. Perhaps the reviewers wanted to stick it to the editors.
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 had passed by once would return again, physicists considered Newtonian mechanics and gravitation to have
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 begins at the 1:38:10 mark in
Consider a bunch of molecules that have been trapped between two mirrors facing each other very closely. In this 'box' the light can't move around freely; it can only exist in certain fixed patterns, somewhat like sound inside a finely tuned musical instrument. Even when all
On November 21, the Union government said the four consolidated labour codes on wages, industrial relations, social security, and occupational safety and health had been brought into force, replacing 29 national labour laws, five years after Parliament had signed off on them and four years beyond the original 2021 deadline.
Daily writing promptIf you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? View all responses I had a dream once, that I was sitting, resting in a cosy alcove of walls empanelled with wood, with wooden chairs and tables with comfortable cushions, smoke from an incense stick hanging
The following jacket advertisement (which is expensive) appeared in The Hindu (and perhaps other newspapers as well; I didn't check) yesterday: Something seemed off about the messaging here when I looked at it yesterday morning, and it clicked into place today: the poster’s claims focus on relief
Analysis
Picture a city where most drivers use the same navigation app. At 9 am, the app says one side street is the quickest shortcut to get from area A to area B. Thousands of commuters accept this option and drive through that street, and soon it becomes jammed with traffic.
Analysis
Individuals can’t master the mathematics of cryptography or the molecular biology of vaccines, yet they still trust these fields of science and the suggestions of their exponents to make decisions.
Op-eds
From ‘7 basic science discoveries that changed the world’, Nature, October 29, 2025: Basic research is easily mocked because it can seem impractical, but, in fact, it is a major driver of economic growth. “The return on investment in basic research — the return to society — is very high, typically multiple
Analysis
The problem begins simply enough. A journalist finds a word that seems to fit almost everything. It might be "crisis", "pivot" or the ever-convenient "impact". It's concise, authoritative, and headline-friendly. It appears once, then again, and soon it begins to dominate the
Culture
A strange thing: a whale has washed up on a beach near Visakhapatnam. Not just any whale but a fully grown baleen, a hundred feet long and weighing about 40 tonnes (although I’m not clear how they were able to weigh it so quickly). Once recalled, it’s not
Scicomm
Scientists have uncovered a remarkable self-healing property in a strange class of materials known as quasicrystals, revealing their ability to grow into a perfect, single structure even when faced with obstacles. The discovery challenges a long-held understanding of crystal formation and opens the door to creating large, strong materials free
Analysis
Jane Goodall was a celebrated figure in conservation. Her work with chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania redefined primatology. However, more than a few publications as well as conservation experts writing on social media platforms have since her passing on October 1 called attention to the ways
Analysis
We often understand science primarily in terms of its tangible successes, looking to it for advances in medicine, for the foundations of technologies, and for the tools with which to predict and manage our environment. This perspective views science as a potent problem-solving enterprise. In his chapter in a new
Analysis
The American-Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr has been awarded one half of the 2025 special Nobel Prize for economics "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress". Now, by rewarding particular achievements over others, the Nobel Prizes are in general guilty of rendering them seemingly
Scicomm
When light, sound or any kind of wave travels through a complex medium like fog, murky water, or biological tissue, it scatters in many directions. Each particle or irregularity in the medium changes the path of the waves, scrambling them and blurring the resulting image. This is why doctors struggle
Culture
Congratulations, László Krasznahorkai, for winning the Nobel Prize for literature. I still remember reading his The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). It was a mostly unnerving, somewhat frightening experience because I read it at a time of great uncertainty in my own life. In The Melancholy, chaos lurks in the banal
Analysis
Bayes's rule is one of the most fundamental principles in probability and statistics. It allows us to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. In its simplest form, the rule tells us how to revise the probability of a hypothesis once new data becomes available. A