Letter to my younger self
January 13, 2022
I picture you at a particular time and a particular place. The time is 1983. The place is Pasadena, just north of Los Angeles. You are at the California Institute of Technology pursuing a PhD. But your heart is not in it… Read on
Pi in the Sky (And Other Places)
November 23, 2021
Pi (π) is the mathematical symbol used to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Or, alternatively, it is how many diameters fit around the pe- riphery of a circle. For at least 4,000 years, people have wondered about the …
A photograph comes to light
November 11, 2021
2016: I am writing about a nineteen-year-old Indian man who, in 1930, is sitting in a deckchair on a ship travelling through the Suez Canal. Anxiety at what he will find at his destination in England is far from his mind as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar t …
Why does the Universe exist?
August 23, 2021
Back in the plague year of 1665-1666, Isaac Newton changed the scientific world, discovering the universal law of gravity and the mathematics of calculus. Now, in the plague year of 2020-2021, is history about to repeat itself? Stephen Wolfram thinks s …
My interview with Carlo Rovelli
March 29, 2021
My interactions with my surroundings define me. I do not exist in any meaningful sense independently of those interactions. Air molecules are bouncing off the atoms of my skin, photons of light are being absorbed by atoms in my eye, compressions and ra …
Why does nature do things in threes?
March 31, 2021
The beauty of Lego is that an infinite variety of things can be built by simply combining a finite number of basic building bricks. But say one day the Lego corporation launched a version of its bricks in which each was hundreds of times bigger than it …
Expect the unexpected
November 27, 2020
The history of science teaches us that the Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. The most exciting discoveries – the ones that scientists live for – are the unexpected ones. Read article. Subscribe to New Hu …
Miracle of the plague year
May 21, 2020
It is August 1665. Bubonic plague is raging in London. So great is the dread of contamination that in Cambridge, 55 miles to the northeast, the university is closed. A 22-year-old man, unknown, unremarkable, makes the trek by foot, by horse-drawn cart, …
Chapter 7: The holes in the sky
April 15, 2020
Herstmonceux, Sussex, Autumn 1971 There was something terribly wrong about the blue star. It seemed to be orbiting a body that was not there. Two astronomers sat at a desk in an octagonal turret room of a fifteenth-century English castle and surveyed t …
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
September 4, 2019
Time and time again mathematics has demonstrated that that it is the unique language of the universe. Among its spectacular successes have been the predictions of the existence of radio waves, black holes, antimatter, the Higgs boson and gravitational …