Slow thoughts

Quantum. Nobody said it was supposed to be straightforward.

Coming at a language as an outsider isn’t always a disadvantage. What first feels like an insurmountable barrier can become a vantage point.

Spies, coders, journalists—they all rely on intuition, improvisation, and experience. It’s tradecraft.

They call it “weaponized randomness.” I had no idea what it really was until I stumbled across it in three consecutive books.

It’s been a good reading year.

If there’s nothing fundamental about ‘elementary’ particles, if nature never bottoms out, then what remains to hold on to?

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.