Posts

Featured Post

The Rosetta Week

Image
  How four fields, in ten days, learned to read the unreadable Copyright: Sanjay Basu L ast week a knot stopped hiding from its mathematicians, a bacterium stopped hiding from its biophysicists, and a large language model stopped hiding from the people who built it. Three different sciences, three different decades of frustration, and one quiet ten-day stretch in April when each of them finally produced something they had been failing to produce for a very long time. A new kind of alphabet, in each case. Not a discovery so much as a way of writing what was already there. It looks, at first, like coincidence. Quanta ran a piece about a new knot invariant. MIT Technology Review ran one about mechanistic interpretability. Math, Inc. quietly announced that an AI agent had formalized a Fields Medal proof in five days. A 2026 paper on the bacterial flagellar motor was sitting in the same browser tab as all of them. If you only read one, you would shrug. If you read all four in a single s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why I Don't Vote

Image
 Notes from a reader of pulp prophets Copyright: Sanjay Basu I grew up reading the wrong books, depending on whom you ask. While most of the boys in my neighborhood were preparing for the entrance exams that would determine the rest of their lives, I was somewhere on a folding cot with a paperback whose cover had been creased into submission by countless rereadings. Heinlein. Asimov. Clarke. Bradbury. Le Guin came later, and so did Dick, and so did the Strugatsky brothers when an uncle smuggled in a battered Russian translation. The shelf was mostly western, mostly male, mostly the brand of speculative fiction that pretended to be about spaceships and was actually about civics. Civics, it turned out, was the entire point. I did not realize this then. I thought I was reading adventure stories. I thought the long discursive passages where someone gave a lecture in the middle of a battle or a courtroom or a marooned colony were the boring parts you tolerated to get to the next plot be...
Post a Comment
Read more

When the Physicist and the Computer Scientist Walk Into a Quantum Bar

Image
  SAS Innovate Pre-conference session A Technocrat’s Discernment, originally partially written on Quantum Day 2026. Then I was in the SAS Innovate 2026 pre-conference workshop, and ended up reframing the article around these two quotes. I sat in a dimly lit conference room at SAS Innovate this week, half awake from the keynote coffee, when a slide appeared on the screen that quietly forced me to put my notebook down. Two quotes, side by side, separated by a thin red line and about thirty seven years of intellectual history. David Deutsch, in 2011, insisting that the theory of computation has been mistakenly treated as a topic in pure mathematics, that computers are physical objects, and that what they can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, not by mathematics. And then below it, Donald Knuth in 1974, claiming the opposite with an almost mischievous calm. Computer science, he said, is somewhat different from the other sciences because it deals with artifici...
Post a Comment
Read more