Slow thoughts

Mapping out the primitives of a field is a useful way to understand its landscape. In the case of quantum technology, this approach proves especially challenging—but equally rewarding.

Evolution has created a nasty cognitive hack that ethologists call the super-stimulus. I’d like to propose a term for a related behaviour.

Richard Ford wraps up the Bascombe saga and leaves the reader with a sense of miracle.

Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is a coming of age story—not only for an exceptional science writer, but for the entire cosmos itself.

He is Poland’s most popular science fiction author, with his work adapted for both the silver screen and a Netflix original series. He also engages deeply with geopolitics, on Earth and beyond.

Guido Tonelli is an author and an experimental physicist. His team at CERN was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The further we zoom in on Mother Nature, the clearer it becomes that, at its most fundamental level, science resembles ‘witch-doctoring’ more than anything else.

Sweden has been lagging badly behind when it comes to quantum tech. Most of the funding has been provided by private players and there’s been no national strategy. That’s starting to change now.

It’s a very human tendency to conflate representations with reality. We are, after all, symbol-processing machines.

When forced to simplify, some experts explain discord as a measurement of a certain system’s “quantumness”

In a funny kind of way, a study like this seems to produce knowledge which extends our ignorance.

Reading. The ultimate unfair advantage.

I’ve gained a valuable insight into how humanity’s collective understanding of this enigmatic field has evolved over time. I feel that goes a long way.

It’s sad to think that we need disaster to strike in our lives, in order to sober up and see what’s worth a damn. Sad, but at the same time also somehow hopeful.

What other branch of science can claim to solve teleportation and levitation? Where else to turn for invisibility cloaks and computers which run on light alone?