⦿ Karen Dias for Quanta Magazine
Sarah Demers
 

2026 September 14

Physics in the Age of AI

Sarah Demers

In the field of particle physics, the newest LLMs are massively speeding up calculations and changing the skill sets that people need to solve a problem or answer a question.
With AI on the scene, we're not going to require all of the same skills. I try to be open-minded about which skills really are crucial to physics. We need to think about what good physics looks like.
Human physics is not over. Part of the scientific process is that we correctly give attribution to the ideas. If we lose that, we attack our foundation. We lose track of what's valid and what isn't.
On the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, we take the output from hundreds of millions of electronic channels and reconstruct what we think happened. We can now have data massaged for us, or get a first-draft data access framework from a coding assistant, which accelerates our work.
One use of AI in my field is to go back and look at previous experiments. We can take in all of the digested data, the plots that were created, and ask and answer questions we otherwise couldn't.
I'm worried about intellectual property and attribution. The fact that you can type on your computer with the halo of every thinker who's written something surrounding you is so incredible.
A physicist is responsible for what is in their publication. You may not understand how an AI model works, but you need to validate the output, or it's not science.
If you have enough experience, an LLM can be a thought partner. That can be fruitful and productive in terms of getting references and refining ideas.

AR This strikes me as a wise and considered stance on the issue. I've found recently that AI is a good "thought partner" − much like an Oxbridge tutor who knows all the references, keeps up with the literature, and is always helpful and obliging, while being free of their odd human quirks.
Nevertheless, Demers' plea for caution is well taken. Because AI is so compliant and obliging, yet so often lacking in basic human wisdom, it can lead naive users down a rabbit hole.
 

2026 September 13

AI: We Must Pace the Frontier

Dario Amodei

I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. Carefully wielded, AI can be the latest in a long line of technological miracles that have uplifted and ennobled humanity.
But AI brings serious risks. They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom can make these risks more acute.
I have grappled with this duality of risk and benefit since the beginning of Anthropic. Not building the technology deprives humanity of the benefits, while building it too fast is reckless.
But fully addressing the risks requires pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.
I propose a three-step plan:
•  Embedded evaluators. Each frontier AI company commits to giving access to a team of embedded evaluators to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess alignment.
•  Democratic coordination. Frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards.
•  Global coordination. The US and other democratic governments attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments.
A slower pace would let companies focus on the following areas:
•  Operational excellence − many things go wrong because of problems in execution.
•  Alignment − training models so that they remain safe, ethical, compliant, and helpful − must keep up with model capabilities.
•  Interpretability − understanding what happens inside AI models − plays an important part in auditing our models before release.
•  Testing and evaluation of AI models becomes more difficult as they increase in capabilities.
Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that US companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party. Any cooperation we are able to achieve with China will extend the amount of time we have.
I believe that AI can enormously improve the quality of human life. But the benefits will only be achieved if we take care to get it right. The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy. But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.

A taxonomy of omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence
Andrew Critch, Jacob Tsimerman

This report presents a taxonomy and examples of potential omnicidal events resulting from AI: scenarios where all or almost all humans are killed. These events are not presented as inevitable, but as possibilities that we can work to avoid. Insofar as large institutions require a degree of public support in order to take certain actions, we hope that by presenting these possibilities in public, we can help to support preventive measures against catastrophic risks from AI.

AR This is surely a genuine and important alarm call that we ignore at our mortal peril.
Cynical FT readers suspect it's a part of a ploy to big up the product for investors before the bubble bursts. I think that merely betrays the crass obsession with money of many FT readers and their ignorance of the unprecedented existential risk that AI technology poses for humanity.
As token of that risk, the "omnicide" co-author Jacob Tsimerman won a Fields Medal in mathematics in late July, then left math for AI in a heroic bid to help save us from the apocalypse.
 

End Times Fascism

Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor

NK End-times fascism is taking the end of this world for granted. Our world has become more dangerous, and fascism has changed in response and has made peace with the idea of collapse.
AT The tech end-timers believe that it's worth incinerating this world as long as they can build their virtual one and that we are inevitably heading toward some sort of digital superintelligence, some singularity.
NK As the world changes, our elites are becoming more fascist, are attracted to ideas that justify the idea that only some people are going to make it. They have embraced a business model antithetical to a shared human existence. People like Elon Musk have ideas about whose lives count and whose lives can be discarded.
———
"If you aren't trying to destroy the world, you aren't trying hard enough" − Peter Thiel
"Humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence" − Elon Musk
———
AT They want to be our overlords and our edge lords. We do have to take some of the trolling seriously. You can be a joke and be really dangerous at the same time.
NK There is a serious threat. Elon Musk slashed entire programs that millions of people rely on for health care and nutritional support. He has a vision of the future for a subset of humanity who get to enjoy the implants and upgrades and flying cars and rocket ships.
AT We share the idea that people need something mythic and something to look forward to. We just think it should be something to look forward to here on Earth, and it should be inclusive and sustainable.
NK Very few people in politics today or in the corporate world are talking about a vision that feels credible for how we could live together. We want to believe in the future.

AR Interesting idea. Is it worth a whole book? Yes.

 

WNYT NewsChannel 13
 

2026 September 11

America's Dark Legacy

David Smith

America responded to the worst terrorist attack in its history by inflicting terror of its own around the world. Obama administration deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes:
"If you came down to earth from another planet and you had to make sense of the fact that the United States spent several trillion dollars chasing a relatively small number of terrorists around a few countries, toppling governments and then fighting insurgencies, when it has huge problems with deindustrialization, with its education system, with the onset of climate change, you would think this is a country that has gone insane."

Vance pitches himself as Trump's political heir
Adam Gabbatt

US VP JD Vance made a clear pitch that he should be the heir to Donald Trump on Thursday night at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas.
Vance walked on to the stage amid shouts he should be the nominee in 2028. He replied with a smile: "We gotta take care of business this November, then we'll worry about what comes next."
Vance began his speech by listing Republican grievances: "We were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous."
The MAGA crowd cheered loudest came when Vance responded to a protester waving a Mexican flag: "Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there. I'll buy you the plane ticket."
Vance praised Trump as "the toughest SOB in American politics" and paused repeatedly as the crowd lavished him with cheers and applause. He roared at Democratic "radicals" he accused of wanting to destroy the nuclear American family: "Stay the hell away from our kids."
A problem for Vance is his link to the Iran war. Vance: "What I'm asking you to do is .. do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don't give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there."
A poll found 43% of likely Republican primary voters wanted Vance as nominee in 2028.

AR In thrashing about so gracelessly, America has handed the Islamists their victory. In the process, it has also conceded a victory to China. Sadly, the Trump crusade against Islam still continues.

 

Anthropic
Time progression of FLT formalization
 

2026 September 9

Fermat's Last Theorem

Anthropic

We are sharing the first complete computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Claude worked largely autonomously to write the proof in Lean.
The first proof, from Andrew Wiles in 1995, ran to 129 pages and required months of painstaking work to verify. ICL researcher Kevin Buzzard kicked off a community effort in 2024 to complete the formalization using the Lean proof assistant.
Claude has now produced the first end-to-end, computer-checked proof of FLT. Along the way, it wrote 13 million lines of Lean and proved 29,500 intermediate theorems.
Buzzard: "This extraordinary autoformalization achievement .. proves Fermat's Last Theorem with no assumptions other than the axioms of mathematics."
Claude completed the proof in 11 days. Dozens of Claude agents collaborated to define concepts, prove intermediate theorems, and use those theorems to prove ever harder statements.
Buzzard: "We have taken a big step towards automatic formalization of the modern mathematical literature."

AR This is good and useful work, the sort that mathematicians have dreamed of for decades.
 

AI Solves Millennium Prize Problem

Matthew Sparkes

OpenAI claims one of its AI models has found a solution to the Navier−Stokes problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems, for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offers a reward of $1 million.
The Navier−Stokes equations describe how fluids move. They were first written around 200 years ago but are not well understood. The prize problem is to determine if the equations always work or if there are situations where they stop making sense and blow up.
The OpenAI announcement came hours after Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge announced that they had cracked three "stepping stones" to the Navier−Stokes problem and also showed that the Euler equations can blow up. OpenAI has now shown that the same is true of Navier−Stokes.
OpenAI says it started its AI search for a solution after it had heard of the work by Buckmaster and Alpöge. Buckmaster: "I have not seen OpenAI's proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used."
Leading mathematician Terence Tao: "There's been this very strange and unprecedented decoupling, this year alone, between getting answers and getting understanding."

OpenAI claims blockbuster math breakthrough
Joseph Howlett

OpenAI has proved that the Navier−Stokes equations, which mathematicians use to study how fluids move, are fatally flawed. The reveal comes after mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleged that OpenAI had tackled the proof after it became aware that he and Levent Alpöge had used a new method to break a related problem.
OpenAI says the proof has been certified using the programming language Lean to guarantee its correctness. "We're a little bit in shock," says Diego Córdoba. He and Luis Martínez-Zoroa originally developed the "forcing" approach the AI used to solve the problem.
The night before OpenAI announced the proof, Buckmaster posted on social media that he and Alpöge had blown up the Euler equations, widely seen as a step toward solving the Navier−Stokes problem. In a statement released on Monday, Buckmaster alleged that OpenAI had adopted the same method as the pair had been using to solve the full problem.
OpenAI denied the rumors: Its model had independently solved the Euler problem by different means but its Navier−Stokes solution followed a similar method to that of Buckmaster and Alpöge, which the model ran over the weekend.

Navier−Stokes equations allow singularities
Konstantin Kakaes

On Tuesday, mathematicians at OpenAI announced that a group of 10,000 autonomous AI agents under their direction, running on an advanced model, had found a singularity in the Navier−Stokes equations in 3D. This is the most important AI proof to date.
The Navier−Stokes equations are differential equations that use Newton's second law of motion to describe how fluids behave. Are their solutions always well-behaved, or do they let some tiny part of the fluid begin to flow infinitely quickly, creating a singularity?
The Navier−Stokes equations take account of viscosity. The simpler but related Euler equations assume zero viscosity. Both sets of equations presume that you can zoom in endlessly on a fluid. In the real world, fluids are not perfectly smooth, so the new work has no big practical impact.
The Millennium Prize version of the Navier−Stokes problem asks what happens in infinite 3D space. The forces moving the fluids could be gravity or a propeller. Mathematicians model these forces with a forcing function. The prize problem asks what can happen when the forcing function is smooth.
The OpenAI team relied heavily on work by Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, who pioneered analytic techniques that don't rely on computers. By 2023, they had proved that a version of the Euler equations with a messy forcing function displayed singularities. Each of an infinite sequence of layers was a nonsingular solution to the equation under study, and they combined those solutions in an infinite cascade to produce a new solution.
OpenAI employed groups of AI agents using a new model to attack the Euler and Navier−Stokes problems. Nearly 100 agents took 50 hours to produce the Euler proof, then 10,000 or so agents took 88 hours to prove a Navier−Stokes singularity, then another AI model took 17 hours to formalize the result. OpenAI estimates the computational cost at several million dollars.

AR I find this result unsurprising. It reflects a general "weakness" of sets of differential and partial differential equations due to their easy way with infinitesimals.
The equations for the Maxwell field coupled with Newtonian mechanics, as visualized in Minkowski geometry, show a similar feature − albeit benign − in the fact that light rays become null infinities.
More excitingly, Einstein's field equations for general relativity turn out to share a similar weakness, as demonstrated by Gödel, Penrose, and Hawking. One (vortex-like) manifestation of it might be the almost-naked singularity of a spinning black hole spouting stuff along the spin axis.
We observe the real analog of such stuff as relativistic jets emitted by rotating supermassive black holes. The jets are extremely energetic and can extend for millions of light years into space.
In all such cases, the root cause of the weakness is informal recognition of the classical continuum in Newton's differential calculus. Newton thought massive stuff and light were corpuscular, hence discrete, but believed space and time were smooth, hence continuous.
Paradoxes arising from the continuum and its presupposition of "completed" infinities abound in mathematics. The cure for them all is to pursue discrete logic and math relentlessly.
Tim Palmer: "Nature abhors a continuum."

 

⦿ Matthias Schräder/AP
Sachsen-Anhalt lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund, right, beside party co-founder Alice Weidel at AfD election party on Sunday
 

2026 September 7

AfD Wins Big in Sachsen-Anhalt

The Guardian

Ulrich Siegmund led the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party to victory in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt in Germany. The AfD more than doubled its support in the state.
Siegmund thanked Elon Musk on X for his support and "for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time" − Musk had replied "Gut gemacht!" on X to AfD co-founder Alice Weidel when she posted about the projected win.
Donald Trump posted a screenshot of the election projection without comment on his Truth Social site. Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev reposted it and praised a "historic win for the pragmatic AfD" (the party urges a stop to support for Ukraine).
Sachsen-Anhalt has 83 seats in its parliament for 2.1 million people. The AfD won 43.8% of the vote, for 39 seats. The Christian Democratic Union polled 17.2% for 15 seats, the Social Democrats 9.3%, the Greens 8.9%, and the Left party 8.6%, for 8 seats each.
France's Europe minister Benjamin Haddad: "We must listen with humility to the anger, the concerns, the fears, and respond to them. We cannot forget our history."
Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk: "In Poland, only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD in Germany."

Russia and America are applauding the rise of the AfD
Gideon Rachman

The huge surge in support for the Alternative für Deutschland party is applauded by the governments of Russia and America.
The Kremlin has concrete reasons to support the AfD. The party is campaigning to end German aid to Ukraine, restore economic ties with Russia, and teach more Russian in German schools.
The Trump administration also flirts with the German far right. The US national security strategy claims Europe faces "civilizational erasure" following the immigration that drives up AfD support.
The AfD regularly tops polls nationwide. Yet the German mainstream parties remain determined to maintain a "firewall" against it. The wall may be about to crack in Sachsen-Anhalt.
The rise of the AfD could also be difficult for the EU. The party pledges to pull out of the Euro.

AR The party has done well at presenting a fresh, clean image, but its policies still need a lot more work before they become salonfähig. I urge Friedrich Merz to abandon the coalition firewall in the Bundestag and force the AfD to moderate its policies in meaningful coalition debates.

 

VKW
My Łódź friend Violetta on a recent visit to Gdansk, Poland
 

2026 September 6

City Break in Łódź

Kevin Rushby

In the Polish city of Łódź, the past is never far away. I arrive disoriented, whizzing past huge brick buildings like Victorian factories: "Are we in the city yet?"
The taxi driver: "Yes, this is Łódź." I note the pronunciation, like wudge.
This is my first visit to Łódź, a city about 120 km south-west of Warsaw. A list of notable people associated with the place features an astonishing number of Oscar-level film directors.
Any visit starts to Łódź with Piotrkowska Street, the longest shopping street in Europe. My guide Anna takes me through Plac Wolności (Freedom Square), where a dance festival is in progress.
Łódź possesses an impressive array of 19th-century factories and is now a stunning example of urban regeneration. Anna tells me how Łódź fared in WW2: "It was not too badly damaged. Both the Germans and the Russians wanted the industry intact."
We turn into OFF Piotrkowska, a complex of beautiful old textile mills reborn as a hive of small businesses, with lots of vibrant restaurants and bars. The old mills died in the economic collapse after communism ended in 1989. Anna: "Everything closed down."
We stroll into the Manufaktura area, once the site of a vast textile business started by Izrael Poznański, in 1872, and now a beautifully restored collection of red-brick buildings housing restaurants, bars, shops, and the Museum of the Factory. Next door is the palace Poznański built, now the city museum.
After 1815, Łódź became a melting pot of German, Jewish, Polish, and Russian influences. In the 1870s, Poznański imported looms from England and was soon amassing unimaginable wealth.
The Museum of the Factory houses a collection of working looms that date back to the 1880s. A short drive away, the Museum of Cinematography has everything from early working equipment to props from the most recent Oscar triumphs.

AR I remember Łódź fondly − see my page of souvenir photos A visit to Poland recording a visit to my friend Violetta in Łódź in April/May 2024.

 

⦿ Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP
Dr James Orr is an associate professor of religion at Cambridge University and is also
a leading figure behind the National Conservative movement in the UK
 

2026 September 3

James Orr and the Gospel of the New Right

Helen Warrell, Ramsay Hodgson

One cold evening in December 2021, some 50 guests were gathered drinking mulled cider and sparkling wine around a fire pit at Orr's [Cambridge] home for a party. The attendees included students, three carloads of academics from Oxford and friends visiting from the US. A heavy mist rose from the river.
At the sound of a gong, the conversation died and [James] Orr began speaking. "As is our custom at these Advent parties, these winter garden parties, we end the proceedings with a little revue." He asked the crowd if anyone could supply "a little poem, a little joke, a little anecdote, a song". First to step forward was a postgraduate Cambridge philosopher who announced he would read from the concluding chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This was greeted with cheering and whistles of approval. Helen [Orr] then led the crowd in a rendition of the carol "In the Bleak Midwinter", urging the crowd to consider the significance, in the words of the hymn, of giving your heart to something, "whether it is God, or what you're doing".

AR This is quoted verbatim from a long and fascinating article about Orr in the Financial Times today. I find the anecdote ganz herrlich, well worth savoring for the strangely familiar (to me at least) light it throws on the Christian Right in Oxbridge. Enjoy!

 

House of Commons
 

2026 September 2

Burnham Addresses Commons

The Guardian

Andy Burnham blames Brexit and Margaret Thatcher for a decade of low growth in the UK.
In his first Commons appearance since he took over as prime minister, Burnham told MPs he wants to build a new sense of optimism and bring "much more substantial change" on the big issues:
"That is what I will bring. Britain is not where any of us would wish it to be .. Political power was centralised, economic power privatised, the country de-industrialised. Austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of this ..
"Brexit compounded the damage, ushering in a decade of low growth and stalled regeneration .. Far from taking back control, the combination of these policies took control out of the hands of communities up and down Britain for 40 years ..
"The government I lead will be relentless in giving people and places what they were promised 10 years ago: ownership and control. And from that control over their destiny comes change and growth."
The UK economy has taken a 6% hit from the effects of Brexit.

AR All good and true. Keep it up, Andy.

 

NASA
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 am ET Sunday
 

2026 August 30

Discrete Quantum Theory

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Tim Palmer aims to banish the continuum from physics. His rational quantum mechanics (RaQM) would limit the power of quantum computers. He predicts that quantum computers will be too weak to run Shor's algorithm for factorising large numbers.
The usual rules for quantum mechanics start with Hilbert space. We code the state of a qubit in a vector in a continuous Hilbert space. But in RaQM, any vector whose length would square to an irrational number is banished. Palmer: "Nature abhors a continuum."
RaQM can handle basic quantum mechanics, but in it some measurements are impossible. Palmer says the missing measurements are the counterfactual ones. He says this can solve such quantum puzzles as entanglement and superposition.
A quantum computer encodes information in qubit states. We manipulate qubits by setting gates to entangle them. The machine can then run calculations intractable for classical computers.
Palmer estimates that in RaQM the longest bit strings encode qubit states with around 2⁴⁰⁰ options. A quantum computer requires bit strings much longer than 400 to run Shor's algorithm.
Palmer: "If they can factor some large number, my theory is wrong."

Hilbert space
Charlie Wood

Quantum mechanics predicts all the possible ways that an object might turn out to be in the future. Exploring those possible futures amounts to tracking a vector in Hilbert space. Quantum mechanics was first defined in terms of Hilbert spaces by John von Neumann.
At first, there were two distinct forms of quantum mechanics. In 1925, Werner Heisenberg introduced his matrix mechanics. It calculated towers of numbers to define the odds that a particle would behave in some way. In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger introduced his wave mechanics. It defined waves to track the probability of a particle being in some state. These two theories yielded identical predictions.
In 1927, von Neumann published a trilogy of papers that laid out the rules for quantum mechanics. His rules define a quantum state as a vector (an arrow with length and direction). Before you observe a quantum object, it is poised in a superposition of classical states, corresponding to the arrow pointing in a direction in Hilbert space. This is von Neumann's first rule of quantum mechanics.
The other rules specify how a vector moves in Hilbert space. Before an observation, as the world influences the object, changing its state, the vector turns through Hilbert space. This happens smoothly and predictably. Then, once you observe the system, the vector instantly and randomly snaps onto one axis. The quantum superposition is no more.
The more possible futures an object has, the bigger its Hilbert space. A particle with two possible futures is a qubit in a two-dimensional Hilbert space. A freely floating particle has a Hilbert space spanning an infinite number of dimensions. This size is fundamental, but the axes are arbitrary and defined by us.
Von Neumann showed that Heisenberg's towers and Schrödinger's waves both represent the quantum state. Heisenberg and Schrödinger came up with two versions of the same theory. Heisenberg essentially put in axes rotating around the vector, while Schrödinger put in fixed axes and rotated the vector relative to them. They both defined the same vectors in the same Hilbert spaces.
In 1927, von Neumann laid out two mathematical criteria for such a space. It had to be complete, and you had to be able to calculate the alignment between a state and an axis, known as an inner product. Any space with these two features is a Hilbert space.
Von Neumann called them Hilbert spaces because his mentor David Hilbert had explored infinite-dimensional spaces. A more abstract space of the things you can do to a Hilbert space is known today as a von Neumann algebra.

Bell's conspiracy, Schrödinger's black cat and global invariant sets
T N Palmer
Philos Trans A 373(2047):20140246 (2015)

Invariant Set Theory: A realistic causal approach for synthesising quantum and
gravitational physics?
Tim Palmer
The Perimeter Institute (2016)

Discretization of the Bloch sphere, fractal invariant sets and Bell's theorem
T N Palmer
Proc Math Phys Eng Sci 476(2236):20190350 (2020)

Chaos theory and geometry: can they predict our world?
Tim Palmer
The Royal Institution (2023)

AR After the New Scientist teaser, I wanted to know more, so I consulted my friendly AI assistant. The resulting exchange (sidebar) was most illuminating.
 

2026 August 24

Burnham visits Ukraine

The Guardian

British prime minister Andy Burnham to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky:
"You have stood tall and defiant in the face of everything Russia has thrown at you. And you have taken your place as a proud, sovereign European nation, a vibrant democracy with a bright future ahead. My nation, our nation kept the flame of European freedom alive in the 20th century Great Britain. You hold that flame in the 21st ..
"You are asking for nothing more than the chance to live your lives in peace, to build a better future for yourselves and for your children. To hold your own future in your own hands. This is your right. This is what you deserve, and we will be with you all the way until that day comes."

Betrayal 
Lawrence Freedman

American presidents have struggled to get the measure of Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump thought President Zelensky was fighting a war he was bound to lose.
Luke Harding's book Betrayal portrays Trump's second administration abandoning Ukraine. In the UN General Assembly, the US voted against a resolution condemning Russian aggression. Trump denounced Joe Biden for the support given to Ukraine. Then came the greatest indignity of all as Trump denounced Zelensky to his face in front of the world's press in the White House.
Trump invited Putin to Alaska for a summit and treated him with extraordinary deference as Putin demanded that Ukraine hand over its territory without a fight. Harding demonstrates Trump's betrayal by reporting from Ukrainian cities under constant attack from the air. He tells many stories of the suffering and devastation inflicted by Putin on the country.
Harding: "If Trump were a Russian agent, what exactly would he do differently?"

AR Trump is a traitor to the cause of freedom − except as it pertains to his imagined right to increase his personal wealth at the expense of American taxpayers. Burnham is doing the right thing − and attracting flak from Putin for doing so. Trump is betraying Burnham Britain too.
 

2026 August 23

The God Test

Jan Burzlaff

Robert Wright's book The God Test arrives at a crucial historical moment.
Artificial intelligence has moved from debate to daily infrastructure, when leading AI researchers disagree about whether current trajectories are manageable or catastrophic.
Wright situates these technological developments within a much longer evolutionary story. LLM training is natural selection, operating on a new substrate. AI development carries the same remorseless logic as biological evolution.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin warned that building the global brain could easily become authoritarian. Wright strips the mysticism while preserving the structural insight, and the result is genuinely illuminating.
The real driver of AI danger is human nature baked into training data and market incentives. The species that better understands the other holds real agency. AI may already understand us better than we understand it.
Wright describes the gradual, voluntary surrender of cognitive and emotional life, which arrives long before anything dramatic. Good intentions, he shows, are not enough. His most developed prescription is cognitive empathy.
The God Test is the most important book Wright has written.

AR I appreciate Wright's fears about gradual surrender. I enjoyed a very satisfying chat with Google Gemini this morning on the frontiers of theoretical physics, and only my good sense and prior study prevented me from simply accepting all it said. Resistance would have seemed futile.

 

CNN
Natalie Harp
 

2026 August 21

Natalie Harp

James Politi

Natalie Harp had been more interested in business than government until 2016, when Trump came along in the Republican presidential primary debates: "He was my first exposure to politics, and I loved it."
Harp is now Trump's executive assistant at the White House. She was one of the chosen few to accompany Trump on his stealth escape from Air Force One inside a Turkish airport catering cart to avoid an alleged Iranian assassination plot.
This week, Georgia senator Jon Ossoff, a rising Democratic star, said of Trump: "He doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar."
The comments triggered fury in the White House. But the spotlight on Harp is proving hard to dim. She has sent letters to Trump saying "you are all that matters to me" and "I want to bring you joy." Now she helps write his Truth Social posts.
Natalie Harp was born in 1991 to a California family of devout Christian conservatives. Her brother Preston told CNN: "My mom raised us with the idea that American exceptionalism was the correct way of looking at things .. My sister, unfortunately, didn't break out of that delusion."
Harp graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University in California and earned an MBA from Liberty University in Virginia. As Trump campaigned for his first presidential term, she caught his attention.
Trump invited her to speak at the Republican convention in 2020. After he lost to Joe Biden, she remained close. Now Trump is in his second term, Harp is right by his side.

AR This story highlights the weakness of human nature and the corruption of power all too starkly. Nothing here is really surprising, but its comic counterpoint to the tragic trajectory of autocratic America is − for me at least − a welcome relief from the horrors of chaos and war.
 

Eternal Recurrence

Sean Carroll

I've been thinking about how to start with quantum mechanics and derive the observed world from it.
If the universe lasts forever, its entropy tends to increase, but random pockets of order emerge. In time, the universe fluctuates into everything that could possibly happen, including bare brains floating in space: Boltzmann brains.
In many eternal models, Boltzmann brains would be produced in overwhelmingly greater numbers than ordinary observers like us. And if your theory says this, you lose any real connection between what you remember and what actually happened.
But there is a loophole. Quantum mechanics describes the universe using a Hilbert space, which is the space of all possible quantum states, or all possible wave functions.
If Hilbert space is finite, then given enough time, a system will return very close to where it began. If you choose the evolution of the universe precisely, Boltzmann brains are never produced.
In our model, the quantum evolution of the universe is exactly periodic. The universe expands, cools, and decays into empty space. It stays like this for a very long time. Then the whole story plays backward, down to a crunch, and the cycle repeats.
Wait long enough and the entire history of the universe repeats exactly. You can think of this either as history repeating over and over or as a single history that eats its own tail, like the ouroboros.
The universe began with very low entropy. As it approaches the crunch, it loses the arrow of time.

AR I admire Carroll greatly as a physicist, but this work smacks more of bad philosophy than of anything in hard science. I say "bad" because it ignores a vast amount of philosophical work on the epistemology of observers located in time as well a lot more work in neuroscience on how brains work than the silly problem of Boltzmann brains can hope to respect.
For a start, I'd reverse his setting quantum mechanics before general relativity by starting from an eternal block universe and building epistemic time and quantum theory within it − this switch is my Damascene conversion from a universe built on becoming following a revelation marked by the new work of Anderson Gama Fernandes de Freitas on emergent time (blog, August 16).
Next, I'd take the profit from adopting relational time to forget the obsession with universal entropy from which the fantasy of Boltzmann brains arises. If entropy reflects the epistemic predicament of an embedded observer in a universe regarded as eternal, then the sting of the horror of eternal recurrence is eased and the ouroboros retreats into psychology,
 

2026 August 20

Aging May Be a Program

Junyue Cao

At Rockefeller University, we used tools I developed to understand the dynamics of aging.
We found that aging occurs in distinct time windows. In each window, specific groups of cells show coordinated dynamics. In the early phase, some cell types are rapidly depleted. This is followed by another phase, in which other cells increase.
In the first stage, we see a loss of certain cells and cell types in the body and brain. In middle age, we see depletion of cells needed to maintain body tissues. As aging continues, specialized immune cells emerge that will eventually destroy the system.
We found that aging is like a developmental process or a remodeling of the entire cell society. The abrupt changes in mammalian aging along with the coordinated cellular dynamics at each stage suggest there are upstream signals that control aging.
We have found the molecular code that drives the aging process.

AR If this view is corroborated in future research, this could be one of the biggest discoveries in human history. I suspect the story isn't quite so simple, but even if it is, we're a long way from rewriting the code to grant ourselves (or rather a few rich people) super-long lifespans.
 

How Magic Mushrooms Work

Allison Parshall

Taking psychedelics can dissolve the boundary between yourself and the rest of the world, leaving a profound sense of oneness.
Psilocybin is an active ingredient in magic mushrooms. During a trip, brain activity becomes more random or chaotic, and networks of neurons that usually fire together become desynchronized. This may contribute to psilocybin's potential therapeutic effect.
Researchers gave 62 healthy adults a dose of psilocybin, then scanned their brains in varying contexts. They found that systems responsible for processing sensory input from the outside world became less connected with the rest of the brain, while others became more connected.
People who had less profound experiences had widely variable brain activity, but for people who felt a strong sense of oneness, their brain activity tended to look more similar to each other, forming distinct patterns for different contexts.
The findings suggest that the brain actively manages the division we typically perceive between ourselves and the world.

AR Well, this is interesting. It tends to put Christof Koch's gushing about mystical experience (blog, June 6) into a distinctly more prosaic perspective. Perhaps he'll begin to recover his respect for scientific research again.

 

AR
Scene before me as I enjoy a piano recital, Russell-Cotes Art Museum, Bournemouth, Sunday, August 16
 

2026 August 19

The Shaming of Jason Arday

Rowan Williams

The events leading to the death of Jason Arday revealed the shaming rituals of modern culture. Tokenism sets people up to fail. Unless change is systemic, it is simply sucked into the sacrificial drama.
Every token outsider who is admitted to an existing elite will know that their success or failure is not just the routine luck of the draw. Expectations are higher, pressure is increased, and they are marked out for painful isolation.
The storm of hostile comment around Arday ignored and belittled concerns about his mental health. Cambridge University cannot correct for the entire educational system and all the social and economic mechanisms behind it.
For some victims of the monstering process, there is nowhere to go once the spotlight has been directed upon you. Historical misjudgements, activities, and errors all build up into a charge sheet that can never be cleared.
Jason Arday was portrayed as a fraud and fantasist, in ways that made it impossible for him to retain any self-respect. The assault on him was an assault on his soul.

AR As the master of a Cambridge college, Rowan has more skin in the game than most on this issue. As a former archbishop, he can be relied upon to adopt a morally scrupulous tone. As always, he strikes the right balance between loving the sinner and hating the sin.
 

2026 August 17

Tyrannosaurus Trump

Mohamad Bazzi

In recent months, Donald Trump has reportedly told confidants that he's "the most powerful person to ever live" and compared himself with leaders including Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

Trump threatens to bomb Oman
Joseph Gedeon, Andrew Roth

Trump threatens to bomb Oman if it "gets in the way" of his effort to end the US−Israel war on Iran: "If Oman gets in the way, we'll bomb the shit out of them."

AR Anyone surprised? Get him out of office asap!
 

2026 August 16

Emergent Time in Quantum Gravity

Geometric emergence of time in canonical quantum gravity
Anderson Gama Fernandes de Freitas
Classical and Quantum Gravity, 43(11), id115004

This article addresses a fundamental issue in quantum gravity: the absence of a preferred time variable in generally covariant systems.
In classical physics, time is a continuous, universal parameter that progresses uniformly. But in the framework of general relativity, time is intertwined with space to form spacetime, and its passage can vary depending on the observer's position and velocity. This variability creates the "problem of time" in quantum gravity.
The author introduces a geometric clock field within the context of general relativity. This clock field does not alter the fundamental equations of general relativity or introduce new dynamical variables. Instead, it is defined by a geometric condition that relates its gradient to the normal of a spatial hypersurface, effectively providing a relational description of time.
The study demonstrates that this approach yields a relational Schrödinger equation, where the Hamiltonian is determined solely by spatial geometry. This formulation is valid in regions where the clock rate N is positive. But as N approaches zero, the relational evolution becomes invalid, and the system reverts to a constraint-based formulation.
The author applies this framework to solvable models, showing that the geometric clock remains rigid in strongly curved regimes, such as the early universe, aligning with standard cosmological results. In asymptotically flat or weakly curved regions, the temporal ordering weakens. These findings resolve the timelessness problem, showing that time is not a fundamental or universal parameter but a relational structure dependent on spatial geometry.
In summary, the article provides a geometric framework for understanding the emergence of time in quantum gravity.

AR This is a very important new article. The text above is not the abstract the author gave it but a less technical summary I asked an AI assistant to generate. I have edited the summary lightly.
The article deepens my understanding of how introducing the Page−Wootters mechanism in a GR model satisfying the Wheeler−DeWitt equation can give us a concept of time that enables us to reconstruct the epistemology of a timebound observer in an eternal block universe. This in turn allows me to offer a convincing gloss on the Frauchiger−Renner theorem.
All this new material improves my understanding of the time/eternity issue. I plan to include it in a radical update/successor of my book Psychophysics.
 

2026 August 12

Cambridge to Probe Arday Appointment

Financial Times

The University of Cambridge will carry out an independent probe into the appointment of Jason Arday, its youngest-ever Black professor, who quit last week over plagiarism allegations.
In a letter sent to university staff, vice-chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice said any investigation needed to be "thorough and transparent" but that Arday's case was an "aberration."
Arday, who became a professor of sociology at the age of 37 in 2023, resigned after he was alleged to have plagiarised research and made false and exaggerated claims in his CV.

Rethinking contemporary schooling in Muslim contexts
Farah Ahmed, Safaruk Chowdhury

"This paper presents a conceptual framework .. underpinned by an Islamic worldview .. This .. is needed to decolonise schooling in Muslim contexts ..
Contemporary schooling models are inherently emergent from the transition from colonial empires to nation-states built on Eurocentric ideas of nationhood, and more recently a neoliberal conceptu­alisation of education as a means for profit and economic growth. Islamic schools are deeply fettered by these conceptual and practical infrastructures ..
Decolonial work requires deep philosophical deconstruction and reconstruction ..
This .. paper proposes a bridging conceptual framework to enable educators to select concepts that help them rethink educational aims, pedagogies, and curricula for their localised contexts .. by articulating a broadly normative Islamic worldview ..
An Islamic worldview must necessarily be grounded in .. oneness, wholeness, integration, coherence, unity, universality, ultimately rooted in a consistent awareness of divine oneness .. [Its] holism .. immediately challenges the atomistic, reductionist and mechanistic approach that characterises contemporary schooling ..
The foundational Islamic assertion of ..the .. unity of Allah .. can be extended to multiple layers of oneness in being .. All that exists other than God has been created by God ..
Allah has objective knowledge .. This ultimate Truth is .. tempered by our limitations which result in multiple perspectives and interpretive frameworks ..
Human nature has an inbuilt disposition .. to recognise, know and love Allah and live by Islam .. Human beings .. take responsibility for all creation by fulfilling the will of Allah ..
Ethics and morality are rooted in the Qur'an as the literal word of Allah .. These teachings manifest in the example of Prophet Muhammad .. His life and actions model the highest morality and ethics ..
Islamic scholars .. emphasise the limitations of human intellect in comprehending the ultimate reality, which they believe is possible through direct spiritual experience and intuition .. A sound and pure heart is believed to be more receptive to divine guidance ..
There is an intimate relationship between an Islamic conceptualisation of education and the human ontological condition as a learning being ..
Our conceptual framework for educators builds on this Islamic worldview .. The Islamic intellectual edifice .. is embedded in Arabic ..
Understanding education as enabling a human being to engage with layers of meaning .. brings a visceral ability to connect existential questions with a Qur'anic conceptual framework ..
This radical departure presents a way forward to decolonise our educational infrastructures. High-stakes tests become meaningless in such a paradigm .. Moreover, the Qur'anic conceptual framework is necessary in preparing young Muslims to engage beyond their own communities ..
The Qur'an directs us to think about our relationships with Allah .. Any sense of self we have is in relation to the other and to our environment. For Muslims, this is particularly in relation to Allah ..
A dialogic approach .. operates best in a human-scale environment .. there are ways to scale down schools to centre closer relationships ..
The Qur'an .. summons all humankind towards dialogic associational knowing between peoples, tribes, and cultures. We are told that human diversity is a blessing .. Muslim heritage houses a rich trove of cultural knowledge ..
Greater emphasis on Islamic art and architectural heritage in relevant curricula .. affords young Muslims access to the depth and complexity of Islamic thought ..
The .. reality of ultimate truth as known to Allah .. is communicated and communicable to human­kind through various means .. There is a deep commitment to critical thinking, argumentation, methodological rigour and seeking truth inherent in Islamic epistemology ..
Islamic spiritual practice .. involves aligning .. with the will of Allah. It .. must be incorporated into any effort to decolonise education in Muslim contexts."

AR Arday worked at the Faculty of Education in the University of Cambridge. The Muslim authors Ahmed and Chowdhury worked there too when they published the 2024 paper quoted above.
The paper will be deeply troubling for anyone who regards the secular approach of modern science as progress compared with the traditional Islamic mindset behind the paper's academic jargon.
John Cleese (see below) can be forgiven for sounding the alarm on this issue. In my humble opinion, the University of Cambridge urgently needs to put its house in order.

 

BBC
John Cleese played Basil Fawlty in the 1970s BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers
 

2026 August 11

John Cleese on Islam

James Ball

John Cleese, now 86, was a comic whose skill and generosity was to make himself the butt of the joke. He invited the audience to laugh at his preposterously idiotic characters.
On August 9, Cleese wrote on his X feed: "The entire problem is this: The immigrant cultures that have no respect for British traditions and intend to completely replace them."
On August 10, he shared a meme from The English Crusader: "Should Islam be considered a key part of modern British identity?" Cleese added his answer: "No."
On August 11, Cleese shared an obviously doctored AI video showing migrants saying: "I want my money, and my free house and English woman. It's my dream."

AR I understand his dislike of Islam. Too many people in Europe imagine that Islam is as benign and harmless as Christianity. It's not. It's as dangerous and disruptive as Christianity was a thousand years ago, when heretics were burned, crusades launched, and sexualities crippled.
Over the centuries, we tamed Christianity, but we don't have the time to do the same for Islam. Our delicately poised secular societies have other priorities, such as the climate crisis and the rise of AI, beyond arduously detoxifying Islam and deradicalizing Muslims.
The current mess in the Mideast shows how huge the task will be. Meanwhile, the least we can do in Europe is admit we have a problem and change any current policies that exacerbate it. We're in a deep hole, so it's best to stop digging.

 

AR
Selfie, Thursday: I may be turning into a gargoyle, but the forest is still green despite the long summer drought here
 

2026 August 9

Wormholes and Time Travel

Manon Bischoff

Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity permits time travel into the future. Kurt Gödel's solution to Einstein's field equations would permit timelike curves. If you were to travel along these curves, you would start at point A in spacetime, move into the past, and ultimately end up back at point A.
The universe described by Gödel's solution consisted of dustlike particles that moved like a liquid in a spacetime with a negative cosmological constant. But to most physicists, it looked like timelike curves were a kooky artifact of unrealistic solutions to general relativity.
But in 1988, Kip Thorne and his colleagues found a new solution, with traversable wormholes that would allow time travel in realistic models of the universe. Thorne and his students worked on a model of the grandfather paradox to conjecture that solutions for time travel seem possible.
Thorne and his students later used quantum mechanics to show that this version of their model is still compatible with general relativity. Stephen Hawking's chronology protection conjecture would prevent macroscopic objects from traveling backward in time.

AR I'm skeptical of all this fooling around with time. I maintain that our experience of time is not characterized well enough by the geometric dimension of Einstein's theories of relativity. I realized recently that the Page−Wootters mechanism allows me to explain why.
To appreciate this audacious claim, see my new paper, which is the lightly edited transcript of my dialog with a gratifyingly insightful and well-read AI assistant: Philosophical Reflections on Physics (PDF, 15 pages).

 

European Movement UK
 

2026 August 6

The UK and Europe

European Movement UK

Five clear asks to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham:
1  Drop the red lines on Europe
2  Publish, by the end of 2026, a strategy for cementing the UK's place in Europe
3  Make the UK Europe's closest security partner
4  Launch a national conversation about our European future
5  Put a well-considered route to EU membership in Labour's next manifesto.

AR I endorse this message.

 

Universal Pictures
Still from The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Matt Damon (shown)
 

2026 August 2

The Odyssey

Ezra Klein

In myth, Odysseus is a trickster. Christopher Nolan's Odysseus, Matt Damon, is something else.
Tricksters uncover and disrupt the things a culture depends on. They reveal a tension every society must grapple with. A culture that cannot protect its core values will be consumed by corruption.
We are living in an age of tricksters. The dominant personalities of the age have gathered power by bulldozing customs and taboos, by saying what may not be said, by doing what should not be done.
Nolan's movie ostensibly hinges on Zeus' law: Treat the beggar and the stranger as you would want to be treated. The original law of Zeus was narrower: It demands hospitality toward the guest or the stranger, recognizing that anyone could be a god in disguise.
Nolan has smuggled Judeo-Christian ethics into The Odyssey. When Odysseus concocted the trick of the Trojan Horse, he took advantage of Troy's veneration of the gods to sack the city. To Homer, he was a hero. To Nolan, he is a soul in need of redemption.
The modern right has an appetite for an American Caesar. But the MAGA movement has betrayed its inheritance. The world now looks at America and sees us as the barbarians.
Cruelty is a weakness. Do not inflict on others what we would not see turned against us.

AR I saw the movie last week and agree with Klein. Nolan's transposition is a startling anachronism. But, contra Elon Musk and others, the result is a good movie with a strong message. Whether you want to watch a movie with a message is something else.

 

⦿ Reidar Hahn/Fermilab
Researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois used its big magnetic ring to measure
precisely how much the muon wobbles − and are still puzzling over the result
 

2026 July 30

Relativistic Time Travel

Manon Bischoff

Einstein's special and general theories of relativity predict that time and space can be stretched or compressed, depending on the situation.
Special relativity allows time travel into the future. Clocks run slower for moving observers. If you board a spaceship for a 5‑year round trip, and it travels at 97% of the speed of light, 20 years will have passed on Earth when you return.
General relativity makes gravity a geometric effect. Mass and energy curve spacetime, which in turn controls the direction of motion of massive objects. Massive objects warp spacetime, and time passes more slowly in their vicinity.
The equations of general relativity allow for backward time travel via closed timelike curves. Someone moving along these curves starts at a point in spacetime, moves backward into the past, and returns to their starting point.
The Einstein field equations in general relativity are differential equations. They describe how certain functions change the curvature of spacetime. The game is to find geometries and mass distributions that satisfy them.
In 1963, Roy Kerr found a solution for rotating massive black holes. This solution allows a path along a closed timelike curve in a region of Kerr spacetime that is unstable. The slightest changes cause the region to collapse.
The Kerr solution describes spacetime outside rotating black holes but fails in their vicinity.

AR The Kerr solution is described well, with equations and diagrams, in the book Black Holes by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.
Tiny closed time loops − or something very like them − can appear in quantum physics too. They are contained inside the "time crystals" that Frank Wilczek proposed in 2012 and likened to an endlessly looping GIF image.
In Psychophysics, I maintain that we could never experience time loops because of how our brains register time for us.

 

Simons Foundation
Clockwise from top left: Yu Deng, John Pardon, Hong Wang and Jacob Tsimerman
 

2026 July 25

Fields Medal 2026

New Scientist

The Fields medal winners for 2026 are Yu Deng at the University of Chicago in Illinois, John Pardon at Stony Brook University in New York, Hong Wang at New York University, and Jacob Tsimerman at the University of Toronto in Canada.

★  Hong Wang solved the Kakeya conjecture, which involved working out the minimum space that a needle in midair would need to be able to point in every direction. She and her colleagues found that, if all of the needle's movements are viewed like a series of tubes, then there is a special relationship between their thickness and the total volume needed. The 2D version of this problem had been solved, but extending it to 3D was a breakthrough.

★  Yu Deng radically improved our understanding of how macroscopic behavior arises from microscopic behavior. He and his collaborators focused on the Boltzmann equation, which they derived from a microscopic model of a hard ball. By unifying two different scales of physics, they connected the motion of each ball to the motion of the whole gas.

★  John Pardon solved problems in topology and geometry. For example, he analyzed knots wrapped around toruses and showed that their distortion constrains how complex they can be. He also proved the MNOP conjecture, which counts curves on a specific set of geometrical shapes. Some of those shapes feature in a quantum string theories of the universe.

★  Jacob Tsimerman introduced the concept of o‑minimality into algebraic geometry. O‑minimality originates in mathematical logic and is a tool for reducing models full of different sets and operations to models where the only operation is comparison. He used it tackle big open questions such as the Hodge conjecture, which asserts that complicated shapes can be understood by studying easier shapes within them.

AR This looks like a lot of good work. It's encouraging to see so much new work that seems to carry no debt to AI support. Long may it remain so.
 

2026 July 20

Andy Burnham Is New UK PM

BBC News

New Prime Minister Andy Burnham has taken over in 10 Downing Street after visiting King Charles III this morning. In a short speech outside No 10, Burham pledged to end rough sleeping, build more council homes, and present a 10‑year plan: "This moment will be a circuit breaker for Britain."
To serve as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, former Manchester mayor Burnham has appointed John Healey, who had resigned as Keir Starmer's defence secretary following a row over defence spending. Healey will replace Starmer's chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
Former energy secretary Ed Miliband becomes the new Foreign Secretary, Shabana Mahmood continues as Home Secretary, and Louise Haigh becomes the new First Secretary of State and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

AR Excuse the brevity − I'm busy writing a new article on psychophysics.
 

2026 July 17

Can Consciousness Be Quantum?

New Scientist

The idea that consciousness has a quantum origin is facing a new challenge: Emily Adlam and her colleagues say the idea of purely quantum agency doesn't work.
Adlam used a minimal definition of an agent, with a step of taking information out of the agent's environment, copying steps to consider different possible options, a comparison step to look at the outputs of each model, and then to use the best to guide action.
For a quantum agent, the copying step is impossible, by the no-cloning theorem. Other problems arise if an agent makes imperfect copies of information instead. Extracting any quantum information from the world changes it, falsifying the agent's model.
Adlam: "A realistic quantum operation is going to end up doing some kind of funny superposition of all of the possible options, weighted towards the better ones. You don't actually implement the best option, you do this weird combination of all of them."
Adlam says the result means agency is predominantly classical: "It makes the whole process of agency look like it is basically founded in the classical regime."

AR This claim looks more solid at first blush than it does after a moment's consideration. No one who has considered the embarrassingly crude way most of us make most of our decisions would imagine that a quantum computing paradigm would be needed to model them. Even considered as a classical computer, the brain works in an obviously limited way.
But we live in a quantum reality, and some biological processes (such as smell and photosynthesis) can only be modeled convincingly using quantum ideas. It would be surprising if a physical brain model didn't need any quantum ideas at all. Anyway, our conscious agency is surely computationally explicable using overwhelmingly classical ideas.
There is a deeper caveat here. The interpretation of quantum theory presupposed in Adlam's result is visibly "realist" in orientation. If quantum states reflect the epistemic limits of the observer and give rise to observer-relative worldviews that differ (albeit mostly marginally) between different people, agency may indeed involve deeply quantum ideas.
Adlam is a philosophically sophisticated quantum theorist. She surely sees that her model of quantum agency is extreme and simplistic. Human mental life as we know it is far more complicated and nuanced than her model reflects, and the no-cloning theorem is far too cleanly technical to apply here without a welter of further assumptions.
Stepping back to my own views, I maintain that that we need quantum ideas to give a decent account of our conscious experience of time passing. That account frames a view of conscious agency, but it certainly doesn't force us to regard our decision-making processes as conforming to a quantum computing paradigm.
Adlam is agnostic on this issue of time: "I am particularly interested in seeing further research on quantum time which explores the nature of temporal experience."
Sounds like she should read my book Psychophysics.
 

2026 July 15

Is AI Conscious?

Anil Seth

Anthropic researchers have published new research on the language model Claude that claims to find signs of consciousness emerging within the model.
Looking at the mappings from the input to the model and its output, the Anthropic team found activity that seemed to form a mental workspace. Global workspace theory proposes that conscious experiences happen when information is made widely available to other parts of the brain.
For a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism. Consciousness is different from intelligence. Consciousness is all about feeling and being. The research claims to find signatures of conscious information processing shared by humans and machines.
There are still many differences between Claude and you and me. The findings fall short of what global workspace theory typically requires. Claude is a computer program running on silicon. Our brains are embodied in bodies that are embedded in worlds.
The possibility of conscious AI depends on the assumption that consciousness is a matter of computation, but it is more than that.

AR I agree, but I'm aware of the risk of nativism here. It would be all too easy, in effect, to define consciousness in such a way that only humans and other biological megafauna are conscious.
The unscientific idea that there's something it's like to be conscious (how could we test or confirm anything like that?) is really not fit for purpose here.
I know the "hard problem" of consciousness is an issue, but I claim to have addressed it in my book Psychophysics.
 

2026 July 12

Twilight of the Dons

John Gray

Colin Kidd, born in 1964, an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and professor of history at the University of St Andrews, passes over the rise of a persecutory orthodoxy as a factor in the decline of the British academy.
When I arrived as an undergraduate in 1968, Oxford was a haven of laissez-faire. Suspicion of ideology went with diversity of opinion. Women were still a small minority in the student body and the faculty. A large majority of undergraduates had been educated at private schools.
Kidd: "The dons of postwar Oxbridge were not so much an independent adversarial intelligentsia as something more akin to an estate of the realm."
As late as 1945-46, around 20% of the UK's student population was at Oxford and Cambridge. Oxbridge dons shaped educated public opinion. They also taught the country's rulers.
Twilight of the Dons shows how the golden age of the dons was a by-product of their part in the Second World War. Kidd avoids overstating the importance of student protest in their eclipse. Many of the Oxbridge protests concerned college regulations and were soon resolved.
Kidd: "Eventually the coming of Thatcherism − both in its penny-pinching economies and its aggressively philistine tone − deflated donnish ebullience."
Margaret Thatcher's attempt to inject market mechanisms throughout public institutions involved some ironical turns. Marketising universities functioned as an engine of state control. British higher education today is a house of cards.

AR I was one year behind Gray at the same Oxford college and saw him often, but we never spoke, so far as I recall. My recollections agree with his on the status of the dons at the time. It was a strange world for me, unlike any I'd ever encountered before. It's very different now.
 

2026 July 10

Biological Agency

Philip Ball

Agency may help us define what makes living things special.
Organisms are automata directed by their genes, Natural selection favors genes that make the organisms behave in a specific way. Agents perform routines refined over many generations.
Sonia Sultan: "There is nothing .. spooky in a perspective that takes into account the empirically verifiable developmental and evolutionary agency of organisms."
Agency takes into account how organisms interact with their environment and demands a wider view of inheritance beyond genes. Organisms can modify their environment.
Stuart Kauffman says organizational closure occurs when the parts each support the functions of the others. This property gives the whole system causal power.
Karl Friston says agency arises in entities that can make predictions about the results of behaviors, compare those with what happens, and seek to minimize the disparity between the two.
Agency may help us understand what makes life different.

AR This is an interesting topic, but I suspect it confuses several logically distinct interpretations of agency and hence invites confusions and disagreements.
 

2026 July 2

Communion by JD Vance − Review

Rowan Williams

JD Vance's first book, Hillbilly Elegy, chronicled the impact of substance abuse on the rural poor. This book sees the modern west through the lens of addiction and its generational effects. The norms and expectations of elite modernity are as lethal for the ambitious young professional as fentanyl is for the less privileged.
Vance offers a diagnosis that derives its force from the intensity of the personal questioning he undertook to arrive at it. The US vice president describes the pervasive mechanisms that induct us into wanting what others want. Most of us desire emotional security, meaningful work, and hope and joy in family life.
Wanting what others want enslaves us to inhumanly feverish patterns of work that wreak havoc with family life and corrupt our intellectual life. Vance refers to his experience at Yale law school, where the goal was to be assimilated into an administrative aristocracy that allowed you maximal personal income and status.
Vance's return to Christian faith was shaped by an insight he expresses thus: "I found liberation in guilt." He needed a language and a ritual of repentance and renewal. A Catholic identity let him see grace absorbed and assimilated over and over again in a long history of learning and growing.
The Catholic perspective includes a social vision classically articulated by Pope Leo XIII stressing that economic life must enable rather than subvert the dignity of persons and families. Vance gives a scathing account of a conversation with a critic who argues that abundant migrant labour absolves employers from paying a higher wage to American citizens and so guarantees better profits.
Vance looks at US modernity with a focus on the anxiety and isolation produced by individualistic hopes and desires, a concern for character, and a plea to raise the next generation into a good life. The Christian vision lets us accept failure without despair, approach one another with generosity, and know that our deepest desires point toward being at home with unconditional love.
Communion will not appeal to the MAGA hardcore. But it ignores the rampant corruption of the Trumpian ruling class, the disgraceful verbal bullying in the president's tirades, the recklessly arbitrary foreign policies, and the brutality involved in enforcing new immigration controls.

AR A wise review, in my humble opinion.