06 · Physics / Episteme
The world, answering in number.
Where the grammar meets the ground — the long argument with nature about what it is made of, carried out in measurement and settled, sometimes, to twelve decimal places.
Here the grammar is put to the question, and the world answers. Physics is the long argument with nature about what it is actually made of — an argument conducted in measurement, occasionally settled to twelve decimal places, and honest enough to admit that its two most successful theories still refuse to speak to each other.
Writing
Essays and shorter notes — proofs treated as literature, and literature treated with proof’s seriousness.
“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” — Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality” (1936)
Curations
Works and minds I return to — the ones that made the abstraction feel inhabited.
Richard P. Feynman
A two-year undergraduate course that failed at its official purpose and became the most beloved physics book ever written. Feynman keeps refusing to hide the difficulty, and somehow that is what makes it clear.
Abraham Pais
A physicist who knew Einstein writes the biography of the physics rather than the man — the only account that shows you exactly what he was thinking, year by year, and why the quantum theory he helped start was the one thing he could never accept.
Manjit Kumar
The thirty-year argument between two men over whether the world has definite properties when no one is looking, told as the human drama it was, and carried through to the experiments that finally settled it after both were dead.
Roger Penrose
A thousand pages that begin with fractions and end at the frontier, written by a man who declines to pretend the mathematics is optional. The most honest map of the whole territory anyone has drawn.
From the bench
On the century in which matter stopped behaving like a thing and started behaving like a probability — how quantum theory was forced on physics against its will, what it actually claims, and why the most precisely verified theory in history still cannot say what happens when you look.