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Essay · physics · September 2026 Quantum mechanics was not discovered. It was assembled, over twenty-seven years, by two dozen people who mostly disagreed with one another and several of whom disliked what they had made. It began with a formula fitted to a furnace in Berlin, passed through a young man’s hay fever on a North Sea island, and was finished in a hotel in Brussels where its founders argued about what it meant and did not settle the argument. The argument was reopened in 1964 by a Belfast engineer working in his spare time, and closed, insofar as it can be, by three experiments that won the Nobel prize in 2022. This is that history.

Essay · physics · September 2026 General relativity is the one great theory of physics made by a single person, and the making took eight years of wrong turns, a borrowed geometry, a race to the finish and a calculation that gave its author palpitations. It was then confirmed by an eclipse, ignored for forty years, and revived by radio astronomers, pulsars and a generation of mathematicians who found black holes inside it. This is the story of how it was found, how it nearly died of neglect, and how it became the most precisely tested description of anything.

Essay · physics · September 2026 Two theories account for everything physics has ever measured, and each has passed every test set for it. One says the world is a smooth, curved geometry that moves under its own rules; the other says it is grainy, probabilistic and built from amplitudes that add. Where both apply at once they contradict each other, and a century of work on the single theory that must lie underneath has produced clues, candidates and no verdict. This essay sets out what each rulebook says, where exactly they fail to fit, what the leading attempts to join them have bought and cost, and the one experiment that might, within a generation, say whether gravity is quantum at all.

Essay · platforms · September 2026 Enshittification is a word for a mechanism, not a mood. Cory Doctorow named the sequence in which a platform is good to its users, then good to its business customers at the users’ expense, then good only to itself. The sequence was in the economics literature under a duller name thirty years earlier. A small optimal-control model reproduces it from three ingredients, puts a number on when the turn comes, and suggests why it came everywhere at once. Applied to the AI firms, it says where they are in the cycle and what to watch.

Essay · biology · September 2026 The genetic code is famously “one in a million”. Recomputing that result from scratch confirms it and then keeps going: the code is extraordinary against chance, ordinary against directed search, not itself a local optimum, and — once a second axis is scored — not on the Pareto frontier either. What the number measures, what it does not, and why the question has stopped being rhetorical.

Essay · Found or Made, Afterword · September 2026 Seven essays on whether mathematics, physics and biology are found or made turn out to have been circling the oldest pair in natural philosophy: chance and necessity. They also turn out to need a third term the pair does not have — and the third term is where the disciplines differ.

Essay · biology · September 2026 Physics trusts beauty; Crick warned that biology cannot. Yet the genetic code is one in a million, the eye has been invented forty times, and the stripes on a fish obey an equation written in 1952. How much of life is found, and how much is the tape happening to run that way.

Essay · physics · September 2026 Feynman's diagrams are the one case in which a private picture became the calculus of a whole field. They are also the clearest warning about what a picture can make you believe, and — in the last forty years — the strangest evidence that the picture was hiding something simpler underneath.

Essay · Found or Made, Part V · September 2026 Ask working mathematicians and physicists what is in their heads while they work, and almost none say words or equations. They say pictures, shapes, a sense of something moving. The symbols come afterwards. What that tells us about mathematics depends on what happens to the pictures when you take them away — and there are people to ask.

Essay · Found or Made, Part IV · September 2026 Every brain that has been tested carries an approximate sense of quantity — newborns, crows, honeybees. Mathematics is exact. The gap between the two is the best evidence we have for where mathematics lives, and closing it is an open scientific problem, not a philosophical one.

Essay · Found or Made, Part III · September 2026 For twenty-three centuries a proof was something a person could read and be convinced by. In 1976 that stopped being true, and the question of what mathematics is has quietly turned into a question about who — or what — is doing the knowing.

Essay · Found or Made, Part II · September 2026 The first essay ended with a division of labour: we choose the rules, we discover what follows. In September 1930 a twenty-four-year-old showed that what follows can outrun any rulebook, and in 1963 another mathematician showed that some questions do not follow at all. Whether that helps the Platonist or the formalist is still being argued.