On the BBC, talking about Gaganyaan and inspiration

Posted on March 31, 2026 by VM

The BBC has produced a documentary podcast titled ‘Hope and fear: India’s space revolution’. Its host, Alok Jha of The Economist, interviewed me late last year as part of it, to provide a media perspective of the Indian space programme, in particular Gaganyaan, access to ISRO scientists, the role of prestige, and the place of a spaceflight programme in a democracy. I was able to listen to it by downloading a copy of the 49-minute programme from the link above (the 64-kbps version is 22 MB). If you’re interested, the narrative and context for my portion begin from 23:15.

I think the overall programme takes an outside-in perspective, which is understandable given the foreign audience. This is evident in many parts of the narrative, from the amount of awe towards what India is attempting vis-à-vis space to the ‘balance’ of ideas the programme contains, which in some parts of the narrative could seem like a false balance. That said, I’d recommend listening to the whole thing because of the diverse voices quoted, including Seetha Somasundaram, Madhavan Nair, Jahnavi Phalkey, and Anil Menon. This is generally hard to get in a single journalistic item and it’s valuable to consider them all together on a complex topic like this. Given the Indian government’s greater sensitivity to how it is being perceived by foreign governments of the Global North, it’s also useful to get a sense of how foreign media are treating its efforts in spaceflight. I myself expect to revisit the programme in the coming months as Gaganyaan nears its first crewed test flight and as ISRO investigates the twin PSLV failures.

After my portion, Alok speaks to Anil Menon, who’s the NASA astronaut-candidate expected to fly to the ISS this July, about the cost-benefit analyses that have come up thus far in the narrative and how he weighs them. In the programme overall, the arguments to justify India’s pursuit of human spaceflight include spin-off technologies, the point that there’s a “small window” for India to join in, that it’s prestigious, and that it’s inspirational. But I don’t think any of these are sufficient reasons to have a human spaceflight programme.

Spin-off technologies and allied industries — I’d argued against the value of spin-off technologies in a February 2025 essay about ISRO’s future. Alok and the podcast’s producer, Dave Anderson, had said they decided to speak to me after reading it, so here’s a relevant excerpt:

… the more vehement supporters of India’s plans have advanced three typical arguments: (i) partaking of the comity of nations, (ii) not losing out on future opportunities, and (iii) the value of spin-off technologies. Speculative though the value of all three are, they can’t be dismissed out of hand. Argument (i) in particular is quite valuable: countries working together on space missions can reduce the per-country costs as well as open new channels for soft diplomacy. The value of (ii) and (iii) is more obvious: to keep opportunity costs in future from surging while amortising them in the interim by taking advantage of the new technologies that become available in the course of achieving those overarching goals.

But a direct counterargument here is that the cost of attaining these new technologies can be much lower if we pursued them in a more direct manner rather than anticipating them as spin-offs. More broadly, if there is one correct answer to how ISRO and India should orient themselves — joining the pursuit of greater goals versus being led by Indians’ needs — it has yet to present itself. The leaders of the Indian space programme also haven’t explicitly articulated what their long-term priorities are nor how they are to be determined.”

Another argument that comes up during the programme is that spaceflight more broadly, by virtue of its scale and complexity, demands a bunch of allied industries, which grow to depend on each other and thus sustain each other. Frankly I’m more sympathetic to this argument because it’s a sensible way to go about cultivating a full-fledged space industry — but what is still missing is an explicit articulation, even an informal one, by the government that it’s doing X in order to achieve Y over the longer term. The first pitfall here is that without knowing Y and how it’s supposed to be related to X, it’s going to be hard to hold the government accountable: after many years it can simply achieve Z instead of Y and say Y was meant to be Z all along. The second pitfall is related: the same capital directed elsewhere — into biotech or infrastructure, say — could generate equal or even more efficient linkages. So once again we’re back to the question of why (human) spaceflight in particular. A deeper problem is that the argument of linkages is often unfalsifiable as stated since any large and sufficiently complex programme can be credited a posteriori with downstream industries. Given that India hasn’t analysed a counterfactual scenario, it’s really hard to believe spaceflight is the only endeavour that can achieve what the government says it will.

Small window — I agree that there’s a window defined by geopolitical and strategic interests within which one can begin a programme to become capable of human spaceflight and find oneself at, or more realistically near, the forefront as the enterprise matures. But if you look past the opportunity it seemingly presents for India, you’ll find that it’s cynical: it’s an enterprise that’s aspiring to leave certain peoples and countries behind. Ideally the window should never close and the opportunities shouldn’t be limited to the narrow definition of commerce where the early bird takes all. For instance, say India misses this window: it should still be possible to find a very meaningful and gainful role. Dubai has no significant industrial or manufacturing base of its own but has architected itself into a nerve centre of global finance and logistics. There’s no reason India can’t cultivate analogous leverage in the spacefaring economy similarly, for instance by developing ground infrastructure and tracking systems that other nations can lease, a talent pool that staffs the mission-control rooms and research divisions of programmes elsewhere or a regulatory environment that attracts commercial launch operators seeking a jurisdiction that’s rigorous without being prohibitive.

In fact, I’m reminded of Homi Bhabha chairing the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955 — a time when India didn’t have nuclear power, only aspirations and, importantly, the awareness that leadership doesn’t mean being a bully on the playground so much as the teacher who can get everyone to play together. In the same vein India could be the place to litigate and arbitrate disputes under space laws or which produces the delicate human and psychological scientific knowledge that facilitates long-duration missions. There are a plenty of options; the wrongest thing we can do now is believe there’s only one.

Prestige — As I’ve said before and do so during the programme, national prestige is faulty essentially because it’s possible to build it through virtually any enterprise. Spaceflight in particular may offer the shortest path to it, especially if you’re well-funded. A good example is the UAE’s “space programme”, which I wrote about here. Just as well, it’s possible to build prestige in primary healthcare (like Cuba), school education (like Finland), public transport (like Colombia), labour rights (like Uruguay), social support (like South Africa), women’s safety (like Rwanda) or in fact national integration, where India has some unique opportunities but which it has often squandered.

The fact is picking spaceflight as a matter of prestige is a political choice, and it merits asking why the powers that be picked this particular one over others. And from what I’ve seen over the last decade, it’s not an accidental choice. Since 2014 the BJP has defunded the National Health Mission, gutted labour protections, and hollowed out the Rights to education and to information while also unveiling the world’s largest cricket stadium and a new legislature that cost at least Rs 20,000 crore to build. Gaganyaan in the same vein is highly photogenic, with a similar cost to the exchequer, and requires no welfare apparatus — so far it hasn’t even forced the government to tie it to social welfare — and which can easily be sold to the Hindu-nationalist imagination as proof that an ancient civilisation has reclaimed its rightful place among the stars. In fact, given the weak opposition in Parliament and the forthcoming delimitation exercise that will further strengthen the ability of India’s already-right-wing Hindi heartland to send more ministers to Parliament, national prestige is set to become — if it hasn’t already — a singularly dangerous reason to do anything.

(This is why I say in the programme that I’m scared that prestige is the answer to why India is pursuing Gaganyaan at this time.)

Inspiration — Anil Menon was inspired to become a doctor and then an astronaut because of the Indian and American space programmes. He also says inspiration like this is measurable. People are inspired by many things. Spaceflight doesn’t have a monopoly on that. Yes, it provides for awesome spectacles and for stories of profound human triumphs. But if we waited on these narratives alone, we’d also find inspiring instances to be fewer and farther between. Inspiration is magical, not least because it’s hard to explain how it works. There is no science to it but in fact a lot of culture and socio-politics. I’d wager there are orders of magnitude more people who have been inspired by things other than space exploration and spaceflight, and for a panoply of reasons far removed from what makes spaceflight so alluring. Spaceflight has a transformative effect but isn’t the only endeavour to do so. Now, to be fair, Anil isn’t touching on this point in order to justify a human space programme; he was responding to a question about the benefits of sending people to space over satellites and robots.

A final point: Anil Menon also says human spaceflight requires “intense cooperation, intelligence, skills — all of which India has always had.” The India of today doesn’t cooperate very well. Perhaps the prime minister, the science minister, and the upper echelons of ISRO get along well with their respective counterparts at NASA, ESA, JAXA, etc. But as Alok and I discuss, the Indian space programme is no longer freely accessible to journalists and by extension to the country’s people. It also has some unfortunate impulses, as exemplified in the curious incident involving the Axiom-4 mission to launch Gaganyaan astronaut-designate Shubhanshu Shukla and others to the ISS, and the ISRO chairman V. Narayanan wanted to take credit for one Falcon 9 launch attempt being called off due to a fuel leak. To the country’s government at this time, it’s all about being seen to be a triumphant civilisation.

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Lord of the Rings Day

Posted on March 25, 2026 by VM

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. This year I almost didn’t write this post because I don’t have anything to say about The Lord of the Rings itself.

Chiefly, I have tired of the antics of men. It’s not about some good men and some bad men. For instance we’ve got some really bad men, buffoons really, battling it out in West Asia and at the same time I work with some appreciably good men at my job who are doing their best to uphold values that we all admire. But it’s not that. It’s that toxic masculinity is enmeshed in so many of the ills that beset us today, from incessant war to daily life. I’ve had my fill of it but of course that doesn’t mean it’s suddenly going to stop or assume a different flavour. But I’ve had my fill of it. So much so that, I realised recently, I’ve become unable to read books by men. I’ve lost interest — temporarily I hope — in what masculine lives and masculine minds have to say.

So I turned to women, and found and read two excellent books: On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (translated by Padma Viswanathan) and The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken). Both were fever-dreams, On Earth like the inside of a pressure cooker and The Wax Child like an incantation. And both were about the cruelty of men, which I’ll admit was cathartic. I’m currently reading The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (translated by Ruth Martin).

The Lord of the Rings books are also by a man, and about many men and some women. But to his credit, J.R.R. Tolkien also crafted men that weren’t men because they were fighters but because they restrained themselves, cared for each other, were emotionally intimate with each other, and openly prized loyalty. In fact it had some men, Frodo and Samwise foremost among them, who were great because they were good friends until the end rather than because they were great warriors or brilliant scholars. Through characters like Faramir, Tolkien shows war to be an unheroic, even dishonourable thing and in its place extols the virtues of peace and healing. You don’t often find such men in epic fantasy.

It seems, in the end, I did have something to say about The Lord of the Rings, and that’s why I keep returning to it every year on March 25.

Previous editions: 2025, 2024, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.

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Climate change and the coastline paradox

Posted on March 19, 2026 by VM

A friend recently told me about a tool called climate.you that shows “temperature change, over land and sea”, at all points on the earth’s surface in a bid “to show how warming is already affecting people everywhere”. You can enter the name of your city or town and find out how the local conditions have changed. Based on interactions with some scientists who have written on climate modelling for The Wire and The Hindu, however, I’d also come to be wary of projections for scales smaller than a whole region, especially for a data-poor country like India. But after the chat, I also wondered if my position was outdated — and learnt that it was. So here goes an update.

Climate change is fundamentally global in its drivers but its effects operate across all scales, from continental changes in rainfall patterns down to local phenomena like coastal erosion. This said, a confusion about the phenomenon’s ability to operate at different scales often arises from the way scientists model it.

Global climate models collect data on atmospheric and oceanic parameters and simulate them on a grid whose cells are 50-200 km across, maybe more, which is a very coarse spatial resolution. When you render this grid on a screen, there’s a value for every pixel and, given the cell size, that pixel represents a regional average rather than a precise local forecast for the place at that pixel. But this doesn’t mean the model is wrong at that pixel, it just means it’s not designed to predict the consequences at that level.

(For example, if the RMC Chennai station says it’s 32 C right now, it’s harder to know how much the relative contributions of land-use, radiation from built structures, heat transported by local winds, and regional warming to that figure are. The temperature may also be sensitive to other factors we’ve deemed inconsequential, such as the amount of dust in the air around the station or traffic outside. A common way out of this seeming intractability, beyond quality control measures at the station itself, is to collect data for several years and check which temperature trends hold up and which ones fall away.)

The scale question is reminiscent of the coastline paradox: no well-defined landmass has a coast of well-defined length, yet the coast exists at all points along the edge of the landmass. This weirdness arises because the length depends on the scale at which you measure it. If you look at the India map zoomed out to 1:10,000,000 — like on Google Maps on your laptop screen — the coast shows some features but smooths over others because your laptop’s screen doesn’t have enough pixels to capture those smaller than a particular size. If you zoomed in further, say to 1:1,000,000, you’d find more features because there are more pixels now for a certain number of features, and smaller variations in the shape of the coast show up. If you zoomed in further, even smaller variations would show up, and so on.

Credit: Google Maps

Hat-tip to Sambavi P. for the fillip.

The climate signals that models are sensitive to are similarly, but partly, a function of the scale at which various instruments record those signals. In both cases, aggregating data from different scales to prepare a region-wide projection actually smooths over complexity rather than capturing it. There’s also no one ‘correct’ resolution and it’s not reasonable to expect a model prepared for one resolution to be equally accurate or certain at another.

This said, the analogy is only partly apt because it diverges over how geography and climate change behave at ever smaller scales. Specifically, while features on the coast become more numerous, and thus its length ever greater, as you keep zooming in, there are no signals relevant to climate change beyond a particular floor. Which means if climate change manifests as, say, a higher local tide level, for that parameter there’s no ‘zooming in’ beyond that point. Second, as you zoom in, climate signals become less messy whereas geographic signals become messier.

In fact, scientists have developed a technique called downscaling whereby they use a combination of statistical and dynamical methods to translate a model’s coarser outputs into finer projections. Obviously this isn’t a lossless exercise — you can’t get more information without paying a cost — and downscaling from one scale to the immediately next one ‘below’ adds some uncertainty. Which means a downscaled local projection carries the errors implicit in the global model plus the errors introduced by the downscaling method. Ultimately, the projection for a particular pixel exists: it’s just laden with uncertainty.

Now, while a model need not have a good projection for a particular pixel, that’s not synonymous with the data collected from that pixel being irrelevant or a non-signal for climate change. Local measurements like tide gauge records, weather station temperatures, regional snow measurements, etc. are all contain climate signals at very fine spatial scales. In other words being sceptical of a hyperlocal projection is reasonable but being sceptical of a local observation demands a higher bar.

For example, say a modeller feeds data about a city’s population density, road networks, and growth trends into a model of a city and tries to predict the congestion in your neighbourhood in one year. This effort is only going to be as good as the model’s assumptions. Now, say your neighbour leaves for work at 8 am every day for five years and tracks her commute time. This data has its own limitations — perhaps foremost that its patterns can’t be easily generalised — but while the model might excel at predicting how the city as a whole will change, your neighbour’s experience is a better predictor of how your neighbourhood in particular will.

In effect, it makes sense to be wary of sub-regional climate indicators derived purely from global model outputs without proper downscaling or local validation but to extend that cynicism towards observed data or even properly validated regional models would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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I, Head-bumper

Posted on March 19, 2026 by VM
Daily writing prompt
What is one word that describes you?
View all responses

Tall.

I’m tall for India, around 6’3”. My height has recently been on my mind. India is not a good place for tall people. The public infrastructure is geared towards shorter people — the average Indian adult male and female are 5’5” and 4’8”, respectively — and the lack of space is most pronounced for me when I travel in buses: if I stand, I almost always bump my head into the upper railing when it drives over a bump, and have to keep my legs at obtuse angles to the seat in front when I sit. Plus there are the various seating areas and ceilings in government offices, banks, and subways, various doorways, and the occasional loose cable dangling from a tree, which is a threat to everyone but to which I’m more easily exposed because to get to my head it needs to dangle less.

The issue got on my mind recently because I’d been shopping for shoes. The average Indian adults are at least 10′ shorter, which means they have smaller feet as well, so most brands that sell shoes in India max out at size UK 10. I however have size UK 12 feet, with a wide toe box for added measure. Together with the availability of suitable designs (I prefer darker tones), that has more often than not meant Reebok for my floaters and ASICS for my shoes — neither of which is cheap. I used to take a loutish kind of pride in being able to intimidate some people in college with my height; I’m glad I’ve since given up that kind of thinking, and in small part because India reminds you that being taller in this country largely means you just bump your head more often.

My folks, of course, love the fact that I can reach for things they’ve stowed in the attic without needing a ladder.

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Spotting fakes by looking at them

Posted on March 18, 2026 by VM

On March 10, the Supreme Court said a balance has to be struck between warding against misinformation online and protecting citizens’ right to free speech. The context was the Centre’s attempts to defend the 2023 IT Rules: when the comedian Kunal Kamra asked who would decide if online content is “fake or misleading”, the Centre said, “When we see it, we know it is fake”.

The case has been led by Kamra, the Editors Guild of India, and other petitioners and in its course the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court have been asked to weigh the constitutionality of a “Fact-Check Unit” (FCU) mandated by the national government. The petitioners have argued that giving the government the power to flag “fake, false or misleading” information will have a chilling effect on free speech and that the provisions turn the state into a judge in its own cause. The Centre’s defence — “known it when we see it” — is, as both history and data science show, a recipe for disaster.

Solicitor general Tushar Mehta, who offered the defence on the Centre’s behalf, is likely to know that the line echoes a chaotic chapter in American legal history. In the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart had to define obscenity. But frustrated by the lack of a precise legal definition, he famously wrote in his concurrence: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

The legacy of this little statement was a big mess. If a Supreme Court Justice couldn’t articulate a clear standard, it was clearly folly to expect local police and juries to do so — more so since what passed for art in Manhattan could lead to a prison sentence in rural Georgia. The immediate result was different federal circuit courts applying different tests, creating a patchwork of legal outcomes across the country. Inevitably, the situation descended into the absurd: throughout the late 1960s, US Supreme Court Justices regularly screened films to determine if they were “obscene” in a projection room at the Court, literally deciding the law based on their own instincts and physiological reactions.

By 1973, the Court realised this was unworkable. In Miller v. California, it established a three-part framework known since as the Miller test. It asked whether the average person, applying “contemporary community standards”, would find the work to be prurient; whether it depicts sexual conduct in a “patently offensive” way; and whether it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value (a.k.a. the SLAPS test).

But since even this framework lacked a universal standard, the potential for harm persisted. For instance, because “community standards” were local, federal prosecutors in the 1980s and 1990s began a practice called jurisdiction shopping: they would carefully prosecute distributors in the most conservative parts of the country for material that was actually sold nationwide. The practice then forced businesses to calibrate their content to the most restrictive local market in the country in order to avoid jail time — a sort of regression to the most conservative position.

The “know it when I see it” heuristic ultimately became meaningless with the coming of the internet, which allowed content producers to be located in California even as their content is served in Alabama, thus confusing the notion of ‘community’ and the resulting community standards. Federal prosecutors were eventually forced to abandon most obscenity cases altogether and shift their focus to child exploitation, which is prohibited regardless of location or community.

India’s proposed FCU threatens to play through this same history of failures. And it will begin as a patchwork of censorship that will depend on who’s looking at a screen when a certain clip is playing.

But the fact is nobody has to know it just by seeing it. Data science and international regulations today offer testable ways to identify misinformation.

One option is automated fact-checking that uses large databases of verified information. Instead of an official simply declaring a claim false, a system can check whether the statement connects to any documented policy decisions or records. If a viral post claims that “the government has banned P”, the system can scan policy documents, gazette notifications, and other reliable databases to check whether such a decision appears anywhere. If no record exists, the claim can be flagged and labelled as unsupported. The machine need not be all that intelligent as the bigger point here is to ensure the verdict can be traced to evidence available in the public domain.

For instance, if a viral post claims “the government has banned P”, the algorithm will calculate the shortest ‘logical path’ between the nodes for “government”, “banned”, and “P” across all known policy documents. If no logical path exists, the system flags the information with a low truth-value score. This provides a quantifiable metric, moves the conversation from “I think this is fake” to “the data shows no factual connection for this claim”, and could even spare the people staffing censorship teams at social media companies considerable psychological harm. The government making the algorithm open-source — as it should be considering it will be in service of the public — will also add another layer of integrity.

Another option is to look at the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which — instead of deciding whether every individual post is true or false — has regulators ask whether a stream of information poses a systemic risk to public health, security or democratic debate. Platforms are then required to monitor patterns like how quickly a claim spreads and whether coordinated networks of accounts (e.g. bots) are pushing the same message. So the focus here is not on the content of a single post but to examine the behaviour of the information as it moves through the network itself.

The Centre’s current argument, however, ignores these tools and doubles down on a standard that has failed every time it has been applied, chiefly because it creates a legal landscape in which no one knows the rules until they have already broken them. Unless of course this is the Centre’s aim.

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The little things

Posted on March 14, 2026 by VM

Tungsten diboride (WB2) is extraordinarily stiff and resistant to deformation and scientists have long suspected it could be a superhard material, meaning it scores at least 40 gigapascal (GPa) on a hardness test. This is important because diamond, the hardest natural material on Earth, scores 70-100 GPa but because it is so expensive, industries often turn to cubic boron nitride (45-60 GPa) as a substitute in tools to cut metals and ceramics. Another superhard material in the repertoire could be a good thing. The problem is WB2 is also brittle: like glass, it is hard to scratch but easy to shatter. This is because its atoms are so strongly bonded to each other that the bulk crystal would sooner fracture than a few bonds yield. So Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, researchers doped WB2 with rhenium, a rare metal that has one more electron than the tungsten atom. This electron changes the way atoms pack together inside a crystal, coaxing the tungsten and rhenium atoms into leaving behind vacancies in the grid of atoms in a specific, repeating pattern. These vacancies were arranged in ordered pairs along particular planes inside the crystal that allowed the atoms to ‘glide’ past each other when they were stressed, effectively allowing the crystal to bend a little to absorb pressure rather than bottle it up and break catastrophically later. The team measured this version of WB2 to have a hardness of 40 GPa and for added measure the rhenium also increased the temperature at which the crystal rusted by 700° C.

By removing a few atoms the scientists effectively made the material a lot less brittle and better able to withstand heat. Little things like this are a reminder that what we know to be true at one scale or context does not necessarily hold true at all scales and contexts. And this is as true as an allegory as it is a scientific fact. Social media platforms as well as TV news in India are rife these days with unfounded speculation and unsubstantiated claims, many of which extrapolate from small pools of information without a modicum of good faith or introspection as to whether what we already know may not suffice to describe or explain the things happening around us. I am for people using AI models in some enterprises but, as with cryptocurrencies, most of their more visible users have pressed them in the service of newfangled Ponzi schemes and scams and, curiously, to mouth off about ‘revitalising’ physics research, so to speak, without stopping to think about what they do not know and, perhaps more importantly, the possibility that, to combine two famous lines associated with Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson, there is always more room in all directions and more — as Philip Warren Anderson wrote in 1972 — is different. The BS is often manifest as accounts on X.com purporting to have ‘solved’ quantum gravity or resolving open questions in particle physics, which may be a scam as well insofar as they come off as efforts to privatise such research and have it enter the hype cycles of venture capitalists.

On a less dismaying note, new forms of organisation do not emerge because the fundamental laws of nature change but because, as with superhard tungsten diboride, groups of things can act together in ways that their individual members do not or because they have been exposed to new environments we have yet to encounter them in. There are other possibilities, too. For instance, these days I am regularly surprised by what scientists are finding out about things animals are capable of. Jane Goodall found chimpanzees use tools, and now it seems so can some fish, birds, and cows. I also understand that there are forms of emergence to be found in the study of societies, religions, history, and art. While it is obvious that the source of surprise always seems to be us not knowing enough while going in thinking we do, the prescient words of Anderson from that 1972 essay come to mind (let it be known that I will never tire of quoting him at length):

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.

The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. That is, it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy, according to the idea: The elementary entities of science X obey the laws of science Y.

…

The arrogance of the particle physicist and his intensive research may be behind us (the discoverer of the positron said “the rest is chemistry”), but we have yet to recover from that of some molecular biologists, who seem determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism to “only” chemistry, from the common cold and all mental disease to the religious instinct. Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.

In closing, I offer two examples from economics of what I hope to have said. Marx said that quantitative differences become qualitative ones, but a dialogue in Paris in the 1920’s sums it up even more clearly:

FITZGERALD: The rich are different from us.

HEMINGWAY: Yes, they have more money.

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The pleasures of rewatching

Posted on March 13, 2026 by VM
Daily writing prompt
What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?
View all responses

I’m afraid the answer is F.R.I.E.N.D.S. My sister and I watched it growing up, then rewatched it, the re-rewatched it, and now then have it playing in the background as I work. I have some problems with it but I’ve realised that memories of watching the show are in my head intertwined with good times with my family simply because they happened very close to each other — the same evening, for example — so thinking of one has often meant thinking of the other. I suppose I also like that all its seasons end on a happy note, which sometimes strains credulity but I think that’s been a small price to pay, these days, for some laughter and the knowledge that it will all end well.

As for films: I’ve watched several more than five times, but the ones I’ve rewatched the most are compilations of the actors Vadivelu and Goundamani. I’m not sure how familiar people beyond India are with how comedy scenes exist in our films. Watch few a dozen or so featuring the best comic actors of Tamil cinema and you will realise they’re drop-ins — little skits or vignettes that an actor and his crew will have crafted to be connected loosely or strongly to the film’s narrative at large but which can often still be removed without much consequence.

This has also allowed studios, network operators, and others to compile scenes featuring a single actor across films into a single YouTube video, often a few hours long. And I’ve rewatched those featuring the talents of Vadivelu and Goundamani (separately) several hundred times. In fact, I’d wager there isn’t a scene featuring Vadivelu I haven’t watched, and that would likely go for most Tamilians. I also know his lines by heart and they haven’t become more boring with repetition. I only know the names of a few films, however, but in Vadivelu’s case everyone knows that doesn’t matter. His scenes often stand on their own.

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On mathematics and reputation

Posted on March 11, 2026 by VM

From ‘Formalizing the stability of the two Higgs doublet model potential into Lean: identifying an error in the literature’, uploaded to arXiv on March 9, 2026:

Firstly, we believe this to be the first time a non-trivial error in a research level physics paper has been identified through the process of formal verification. … Secondly, this was one of the first research-level papers where formalization was attempted, and it was not chosen with the intention of finding an error, but rather because we thought the process of formalization would be easy and the likelihood of an error was low. From this one could make the worrying extrapolation that there are many such errors in the physics literature. It is also a strong motive for making formal verification the gold standard for physics papers.

This is interesting because I haven’t heard of published theoretical physics papers being flawed in the same way I’ve read about such papers in, say, psychology or behavioural economics. I am of course extrapolating from my personally small knowledge base: theoretical physicists may find this surprising, although I haven’t seen signs of that. To the contrary in fact.

I recently found out more about Lean and formalisation (for my piece in The Hindu about mathematicians’ efforts to formalise and then verify Maryna Viazovska’s work that won her the Fields Medal in 2022). Formalisation is the task of translating ‘human’ proofs of maths problems in the language of a machine in great detail; the language here is Lean. Conlon’s point is that if Lean found errors in a relatively simple calculation, it’d be in for worse in the face of path integrals, which are the foundation of almost all modern quantum theory but also quite messy.

In the course of reading more about this, I came across a curious December 2024 post on the Xena Project (of “mathematicians learning Lean by doing”) blog by Imperial College in London professor of pure mathematics Kevin Buzzard. He wrote that when some mathematicians were using Lean to check some advanced maths proofs, Lean found that a particular step in a 1965 paper by a mathematician named Norbert Roby appeared to be wrong. It mattered because a branch of mathematics called crystalline cohomology, which had been built on Roby’s work and used by many mathematicians since the 1970s technically had a gap in its foundations.

But nobody thought the math was actually wrong, only that the written proof had a hole in it. However, in formal mathematics, a result being ‘probably fine’ isn’t good enough; as Buzzard put it, “you have to actually fix it” rather than rest on the idea that it’s fixable. At some point, the noted American mathematician Brian Conrad caught wind of the mistake and, after looking into it, found a fix: he knew that a different proof of the same result existed in the appendix of a book by Pierre Berthelot and Arthur Ogus. So a crisis was averted. But then came the twist: Buzzard later had lunch with Ogus and gleefully told him how his work had saved the day. Ogus’s response: “Oh, that appendix has several errors in it. But I think I know how to fix them.”

Buzzard also mentioned one defence of mathematical ideas that had problems at their foundations that struck me, too — that “crystalline cohomology has been used so much since the 1970s that if there were a problem with it, it would have come to light a long time ago” — but UniDistance Suisse mathematics professor David Loeffler countered it in the comments saying the risk is that mathematicians might be placing too much stock in the idea that something can be fixed when it really may not be that way, and could even be “collectively wrong in their estimation”. How could this be possible?

I’m learning the answers have to do with how mathematicians work together. For instance when they productively use some framework, like crystalline cohomology, for decades to generate papers and careers, they also create an enormous social pressure rooted in the idea that the framework works. They also assume — reasonably — that the framework has already survived the questions that could have revealed flaws in its foundations. But as Buzzard’s and Loeffler’s exchange shows, it’s likely that that question has already come along but there’s no guarantee. Moreover even if there’s a flaw it might show itself only in particular applications and the rest of the time the framework can appear to be ‘functioning’ as expected.

(This to me also speaks to the unsuitability of using buildings or similar structures in the real, physical world as metaphors to communicate their nature — at least not without also drawing on, say, the idea that those particular applications don’t stress the framework’s specific weak points.)

Then of course there’s the problem with how mathematicians build on each other’s work, which is also a problem with peer-review as well. The norm is to verify that argument B follows in valid ways from argument A and not whether argument A is itself valid, nor is it to derive argument B from scratch. This way an error in one old paper can spread through citations for many years, with each subsequent mathematician correctly reasoning from a flawed starting point.

This is reminiscent of the Schön scandal in the 2000s. The German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön fabricated data on organic superconductors and field-effect transistors but by the time his fraud came to light, other groups had begun building on his results, including designing experiments premised on his findings being real. So when Schön was ultimately exposed, a not insubstantial chunk of the field had to be unwound. For an even more dramatic example from history: the HeLa cells from Henrietta Lacks are extraordinarily robust and, it turned out, had silently contaminated a large fraction of cell cultures in labs worldwide from the 1950s onward. So researchers who believed they were studying prostate cancer cells, breast cancer cells or other lines were in many cases actually studying HeLa cells. But unlike the case with zombie citations, in both cases the ‘secondary’ scientists had no idea they were studying a wrong thing.

I used these examples because it seems the ways in which mathematicians fail could be the same ways in which scientists more broadly fail: due to common blindspots, foundational assumptions that nobody thinks to double-check (or which they assume others have checked), social structures that reward ‘progress’ more than other processes like auditing, and, overall, by underestimating the importance of social forces to the way scientists and mathematicians organise and share their work. Lean et al. are, or formalisation more broadly is, thus forcing mathematicians to look past these assumptions and, as the arXiv paper’s author Joseph Tooby-Smith wrote, that they’re already finding gaps in fundamental ideas suggests the foundations of rational inquiry may be somewhat less certain than a discipline’s reputation alone might imply.

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Measuring science stories

Posted on March 10, 2026 by VM

Google News picks up on science stories that many outlets are covering. Its reasoning is that the more outlets publish a particular story, the more reader interest the story has. However, the flaw here is that news outlets don’t evaluate all kinds of science developments on an equal footing nor do they always focus on reader interest. (The latter is more so since news outlets often don’t select stories for reader interest; instead they select stories for the reasons described below, then work in the reader interest.)

Outlets focus on those that they can understand or which they can cover for a lower cost. The former is almost always a major development — which is rare in science, as research is fundamentally incremental — or a finding that has been misreported in a university press release or in fact at the journal itself, e.g. if the paper title is itself oversimplified.

The latter — findings that can be covered at a lower cost — are typically simple, whose significance or wonderfulness is easy to communicate, e.g. “astronomers produce the largest image ever taken of the heart of the Milky Way” or “with lunar missions looming, scientists grow chickpeas in ‘moon dirt’”.

Altogether, the science stories the press has focused on have systematically avoided more involved topics or ideas, those that can’t be communicated easily, and those that require some expense (e.g. the services of a veteran reporter or freelancer, of a graphics team, etc.). Since Google News, and Google Discover by extension — which is also driven by what readers are interested in — drive a lot of traffic to news websites, and page views and unique users remain the metrics of choice at these websites, Google News/Discover also aggregate and create a preference among publishers for relatively uncomplicated science stories and ideas.

Which means when we pursue stories that are complicated or interesting in a way that allows us to tell a unique story, we shouldn’t expect it to draw readers from Google News/Discover nor focus on page views or unique views. Instead, we’re better off focusing on readers’ average time on page.

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Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)

Posted on February 28, 2026 by VM

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: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes, edited by anthropologists Renny Thomas and Sasanka Perera, so compelling. The book has 30 chapters written by 33 people, each one exploring the oft-hidden colonial undertones of words in everyday Indian English, and by extension documenting how deceptively treacherous the task of decolonialising the things the words refer to is — and many of them intersect with science in practice.

Indeed my own entry point into this book was half my general interest in Renny’s work, which to an amateur historian of science like me has been constantly insightful, and half my long-standing frustrations with how India and the Indian state commemorate science. On the occasion of National Science Day, which is today, I had an op-ed published in The Hindu on February 26 on why decolonialising science in India also requires Indians to “de-Nobelise” science, including shedding their fondness for individual geniuses in favour of the collective labour that science actually needs to function. Excerpt:

The keywords … clarify what a de-Nobelised imagination of science, paralleling the decolonisation of science, would require. It would force India to ask how Indians produce the thing called ‘recognition’ — through discoveries and papers as much as by institutions that sort labour into celebrated and hidden.

National Science Day, then, should not simply reproduce a Nobel-shaped story about genius and external validation. It should become an annual day of discussion of what counts as science, including the work of technicians, field staff, nurses, lab attendants, data collectors, and others whose labour is essential to make new knowledge but is rarely commemorated.

Good scientific practice requires us to regularly recalibrate the instruments to make sure they haven’t become less precise. Language, Decolonial Keywords shows, is the same way and we need to constantly recalibrate it for the same reasons.

For example, a mind accustomed to scientists’ oft-universalist claims will find the book unsettling because of how consistently it exposes such universalism to be a hoax. In her chapter, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies political theorist Prathama Banerjee has explored the idea of “shunya”. The global history of mathematics celebrates this entity, commonly equated to the entity called zero, as India’s gift to the world — a numerical placeholder that liberated mathematics from physically counting objects and eventually making calculus and modern computing possible. But if you keep reading, you’ll find that “shunya” was originally a profound ontological concept in Buddhist philosophy, an expression of emptiness and the absence of a permanent ‘self’. And that when modern mathematics extracted the concept, it discarded the philosophical attachments, effectively stripping the word of its ability to critique social hierarchies like caste, which in fact banks on the illusion of a permanent ‘self’.

In addition to the book’s chapters on ‘jugaad’, ‘poromboke’, and ‘laboratory’, which I tried to explore in my piece, the same theme is also on display in the chapter on “Igu”, the shaman of the Idu Mishmi people in Arunachal Pradesh, especially the tension between Western scientific taxonomy and indigenous ecological networks, written by Ambika Aiyadurai and Razzeko Delley, and the chapter on “Adivasiyat” by Roshan Praveen Xalxo.

Under the gaze of either modern medicine or conservation biology, a shaman comes across as a psychological curiosity and indigenous land rights as a consequence of politics. However, as Aiyadurai, Delley, and Xalxo set out, the words “Igu” and “Adivasiyat” really recall a “multispecies world” or a “multibeing cosmos” — recalling the writing of anthropologist Anna Tsing in 2013 — where rivers and spirits participate in making and maintaining the ecological network. And we don’t have to abdicate the scientific method to recognise that these indigenous vocabularies offer a sophisticated and importantly localised understanding of an environmental balance that the technocratic and extractivist models of the modern Indian state are themselves abdicating.

My natural scepticism sometimes (and only sometimes) flares up when I find the word “decolonial” because too often these days, and almost always in certain political contexts, “decolonialising science” in the contemporary Indian context has become a Trojan horse for right-wing nativism, where mythological allegories are retrofitted as ‘ancient’ quantum physics and surgery. But to their credit, Thomas and Perera and the chapters’ various authors are acutely aware of and make honest attempts to sidestep this danger. For example Harshana Rambukwella’s chapter on “Chinthanaya”, the Sinhala term for “thought” or “indigenous epistemology”, is carefully to separate its origins as an anti-colonial concept from how the island country’s majoritarian nationalists weaponised it during the COVID-19 pandemic to push some medical professionals to promote one charlatan’s “divine syrup” as a cure.

Decolonial Keywords is a dense book steeped in the theoretical frameworks of history, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. The chapters dealing with the literary nuances of medieval poetry and the exact etymological roots of regional dialects in particular require quite a bit of patience — but the intellectual payoff is guaranteed. It’s also nice to have critical work like Decolonial Keywords that presents morsels of analysis and perspectives on a variety of topics because in this field, it’s generally an entire book on a single topic.

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