I gasped and sobbed and clutched the book when it was over. I was so thankful for the reminder that reading can still be like this, that the realm of the unread always holds, somewhere, the exact thing I'm looking for, whatever it is.
An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.
Record crates, video-store aisles, and bookshop tables were all machines for serendipity. What made them work was friction. They were slow, physical, and slightly annoying, and that was the engine.
The plate tectonics model that would arise from her discovery would go on to change our understanding of life itself: Tectonic activity mixes surface and ocean chemistry, recycling elements to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature stable, and is what allowed Earth's waters to remain liquid for the billions of years that complex life needed to evolve. Without it, we would have never risen from the oceans to measure the
2mo ago
We are compelled to drive onward; we cannot turn back. There is a fire in men that does not let them rest. And so they must go on and on, until they find something real — or perish in the attempt.
2mo ago
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. But stranger still is the fact that it does — partially, provisionally, and always at the cost of uprooting what we thought we already knew.
Those early adopters found, to their surprise, not only that the models were good at puzzles, but that they could help break genuinely new ground. Soon, mathematicians were using AI to discover and prove new results, accomplishing in a day what would have once taken them weeks or months.
An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.
That inaugural Big Ears—scattered across a clutch of theaters and strange little rooms in a sliver of the then-sleepy city—was a continual revelation for 25-year-old me, instantly expanding my sense of what was possible.
There could be more complex patterns in nature — too complex for a human to hold in their mind, or even notice in the first place, but stable and useful nonetheless. What if there are other complex-but-useful patterns in other domains, like materials science and biology? If they exist, I think AI will be able to find them and apply them.
6mo ago
The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.
The jaw has this weird twist that drove us crazy trying to figure it out. We were scratching our heads over this for years, wondering if it was some kind of deformation. But at this point, we've got nine jaws from this animal, and they all have this twist, including the really, really well-preserved ones. So it's not a deformation, it's just the way the animal was made.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
