Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)
Everyone who knows me knows that my intellectual coordinates are defined by scientific ideas, even when they’re about sociology or the humanities. This is why I found a new book, Decolonial Keywords:…
Nobel Prizes
23 posts
Mokyr hearts Nobel Prizes
I don’t like Joel Mokyr’s history of progress and have written about that before. I also have a longer analysis and explanation of my issues coming soon in The Hindu. On December 8 I got more occasion…
A bad Nobel for Mokyr
The American-Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr has been awarded one half of the 2025 special Nobel Prize for economics "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through te…
Majorana 1, science journalism, and other things
While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, the scientific achievements they have revealed have been some of the funnest concepts I’ve discovered in science,…
On the 2024 Nobel Prizes and the Rosalind Lee issue
The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most demanding levels. Yet these relati…
Numbed by numbers
Couple things in my news feed this morning that really woke me up — one a startling statistic and the other a reminder of what statistics miss. The first from Nature, 'How to win a Nobel prize: wh…
Marginalia: Romila on textbooks, Rapido ad, Nobel nonsense
We may go on deleting sections of our history but in the world outside where there are multiple centres of research into the Indian past, and many scholars, there these expunged sections from books us…
Marginalia: Romila on textbooks, Rapido ad, Nobel nonsense
We may go on deleting sections of our history but in the world outside where there are multiple centres of research into the Indian past, and many scholars, there these expunged sections from books us…
The question of Abdus Salam 'deserving' his Nobel
Peter Woit has blogged about an oral history interview with theoretical physicist Sheldon Glashow published in 2020 by the American Institute of Physics. (They have a great oral history of physics ser…
Hail the Royal Society
The Royal Society's appointment of its first Brazilian member since 1871 brings an underappreciated form of our colonial hangover to the fore.…
The paradoxical virtues of primacy in science
Primacy is a false virtue imposed by the structures of modern science – yet it is also necessary to right some wrongs.…
Marie Curie: An icon or 'in the way'?
Who would have been the most iconic woman physicist of all time if the Nobel Prizes didn't exist?…