Richard Feynman

13 posts

Lighting the way with Parrondo’s paradox

9 min read
Analysis Scicomm Brownian motion Brownian ratchet cancerous tumours chemotherapy Feynman-Smoluchowski ratchet game theory kinesin low-dose metronomic maximum tolerated dose myosin Parrondo's paradox randomness Richard Feynman

In science, paradoxes often appear when familiar rules are pushed into unfamiliar territory. One of them is Parrondo’s paradox, a curious mathematical result showing that when two losing strategies ar…

An Upanishadic lesson for modern science?

6 min read
Analysis Culture Science Amit Chaudhuri Bhagavad Gita causality creation creator disinterestedness Eastern Philosophy genius genius construct Gita Chadha Immanuel Kant impersonality Isa Upanishad Kena Upanishad Lawrence M Krauss modern science New Critical Philosophy of Science power Richard Feynman scientific genius The Life of Science TS Eliot Upanishads Western philosophy

Do the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads lack the "baggage of biography" – to borrow Amit Chaudhuri's words – because we don't know who the authors, outside of the mythology, are or –…

Redeeming art v. redeeming science

5 min read
Analysis Culture Science diversity Enrico Feri Erik Shapiro Geoffrey Marcy Georges Lemaître Jeffrey Epstein Lawrence Krauss passing the trash Richard Feynman separate art from artist separate scholar from scholarship sexual harassment social anthropology

Recently, someone shared the cover of a soon to be released book, entitled The Physics of Climate Change, authored by Lawrence M. Krauss and expressed excitement about the book's impending publica…

Freeman Dyson's PhD

3 min read
Op-eds Science Cornell University doctorate Freeman Dyson Institute for Advanced Study Julian Schwinger Nobel Prize PhD privilege quantum electrodynamics Richard Feynman scientific publishing scientific research Vannevar Bush Shin'ichiro Tomonaga

The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [qu…

Two sides of the road and the gutter next to it

3 min read
Culture Op-eds bias Bob Woodward Donald Trump ignorance Jay Rosen Kary Mullis Nobel Prizes objectivity Omar Kelly Poynter Richard Feynman Surjit Bhalla Swarajya Mag The New York Times victim-blaming victimisation view from nowhere women in STEM

I have a mid-October deadline for an essay so obviously when I started reading up on the topic this morning, I ended up on a different part of the web – where I found this: a piece by a journalist tal…