Philip Ball

Two interesting books in the post. First, this fascinating study by @simon_schama, focusing on the little-known pioneer of vaccination Waldemar Haffkine and his work combating cholera and bubonic plague in late 19th C India.

Second, this intriguing short volume from physics Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi, which will hopefully go some way to explaining what he got his Nobel for - which was greeted with some head-scratching at the time.

Realising that we typically give a misleadingly confident (& wrong) "this is how it happens" about not only quantum speed-up but quantum computing generally was one of my motivations for writing Beyond Weird. Scott's article here from 2021 is one of the best explanations of why.

I was prompted here by reading this excellent paper by @MelMitchell1 & David Krakauer - & now find this in it: "can [LLMs'] unimaginably large systems of statistical correlations produce abilities that are functionally equivalent to human understanding?"

This is an important book, believe me.

Interesting article on path integrals and their use in quantum field theory and general relativity. Worth perhaps remembering Feynman's own injunction not to confuse the mathematics for the physics.

Very interesting story about the origins of eukaryotic introns. One issue that rarely gets attention is how alternative splicing is even possible: how can a protein with rearranged chunks still be functional at all? It seems at least part of the answer...

This book is great - this is maths *everyone* needs to know.

I really enjoyed this piece - lots to think about and argue with. I particularly like the suggestion that a review should not be a synopsis of the book plus a judgement, but uses the book as a launchpad for continuing the conversation.

Planck was indeed a tragic case - Heilbron's book is excellent on that. But one could reasonably question whether his oppositional stance amounted to much. He was an old-school conservative, confused and perplexed by how the state itself could become illegitimate and immoral.