⦿ Northwestern University, Patrick Imbert/Collège de France, Ashley McCabe/Brown University
L to R: Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt
 

2025 October 15

Nobel Prize in Economics

Philip Ball

The 2025 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences has been awarded to three researchers who have shown how technological and scientific innovation and market competition drive economic growth.
One half of the prize goes to Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, and the other half is split between Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France and the LSE and Peter Howitt of Brown University, Providence, RI.
Mokyr showed that innovations based on scientific understanding increase economic growth. Aghion and Howitt clarified the market mechanisms behind sustained growth via creative destruction.
Growth covers a steady churn of businesses and products. The researchers showed how companies invest in R&D to improve their chances of finding a new product and calibrated such investment.
The incentive for investing in R&D coming from market forces alone declines as market share grows. To guarantee the societal benefits of constant innovation, the state can subsidize R&D.
Creative destruction leads to companies failing and jobs being lost. Society needs safety nets and conflict resolution to navigate such problems.

AR With funding for scientific research under threat in the United States, this looks like a politically colored award. But clearly the funding cuts are disastrous for long-term US success.
 

2025 October 13

Trump in Israel

FOX News

President Donald Trump addressed Israel's parliament, the Knesset, on Monday after all living Israeli hostages were freed from Gaza: "Generations from now, this will be remembered as the moment that everything began to change − and change very much for the better. Like the USA right now, it will be the golden age of Israel and the golden age of the Middle East."

Trump hails end of age of terror
The Guardian

Speaking to the Knesset, President Trump said: "This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of the age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God. It's the start of a grand concord and lasting harmony for Israel and all the nations of what will soon be a truly magnificent region. I believe that so strongly. This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East."

Trump hails dawn of a new Mideast
Jon Michael Raasch

President Trump: "Israel, with our help, has won all that they can by force of arms."
Trump turned to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu: "You've won. Now it's time to translate these victories against terrorists on the battlefield into the ultimate prize of peace and prosperity for the entire Middle East .. a beautiful and much brighter future appears suddenly within our reach."
The Knesset honored Trump with a nearly three-minute standing ovation and cheers.

AR Trump has morphed from New York dealmaker to global peacemaker. This is impressive. Does it outweigh all his faults and outrages? Perhaps − if this ceasefire both holds awhile and really does look in retrospect like a watershed.

 

⦿ Chester Higgins Jr / The New York Times
Laszlo Krasznahorkai
 

2025 October 8

Nobel Prize in Literature

Alex Marshall

Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist known for his dark, apocalyptic themes, wins this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy said he had won the award "for his compelling and visionary œuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art."
Krasznahorkai was born in Hungary in 1954 into a Jewish family. His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. His literary breakthrough came with his 1985 debut novel Satantango. His latest work to appear in English is Herscht 07769, published last year in the United States.
Prize committee member Steve Sem-Sandberg: "It is Krasznahorkai's artistic gaze, which is entirely free of illusion and which sees through the fragility of the social order, combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art that has motivated the academy to award the prize."

AR Maybe I"ll try to read one of his works − someday.

 

UC Berkeley / Yale University / UC Santa Barbara
2025 Nobel Prize in Physics: John Clarke, Michel H Devoret, John M Martinis
 

2025 October 7

Nobel Prize in Physics

Hannah Devlin

The Nobel prize in physics 2025 has been awarded to John Clarke, a British physicist based at the University of California at Berkeley, Michel Devoret, a French physicist based at Yale University, and John Martinis, of the University of California Santa Barbara.
The trio led a series of experiments demonstrating that the bizarre properties of the quantum world can translate into measurable effects in macroscopic electrical circuits. This included a demonstration that quantum tunnelling can occur in superconducting electrical circuits.
Imperial College London researcher Malcolm Connolly: "Their discoveries of tunnelling and energy quantisation laid the foundation for today's superconducting qubits, one of the leading platforms in the global race to build practical quantum computers."

Quantum tunneling on a chip
Lee Billings

John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis brought quantum tunneling into the macroscopic world. Their experiments relied on electronic circuits built from Josephson junctions and showed how electrons moving through them act like a single particle, with two distinct modes, demonstrating the quantized nature of the system.

Trio behind quantum computing chips
Alex Wilkins

John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis worked on showing how quantum particles can tunnel through matter in the superconducting technology in quantum computers.
In 1985, when they were all in California, they measured the properties of charged particles moving through Josephson junctions, which use superconducting wires separated by an insulator. Particles moving through the junctions acted as a single particle, took on distinct energy levels, and registered a voltage that required quantum tunnelling.
Clarke: "Our discovery, in some ways, is the basis of quantum computing."

The three laureates
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 to John Clarke, Michel H Devoret, and John M Martinis for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.
In 1984 and 1985, they conducted a series of experiments with Josephson junctions. They were able to control and explore the phenomena that arose when they passed a current through the circuit. Together, the charged particles moving through the superconductor comprised a system that behaved as if they were a single particle that filled the entire circuit.
This system is initially in a state in which current flows without any voltage, trapped in this state, as if behind a barrier. It shows its quantum character by escaping the zero-voltage state through tunnelling. Its changed state is detected through the appearance of a voltage.
The laureates demonstrated that the system behaves as predicted by quantum mechanics.
•  John Clarke, born 1942 in Cambridge, UK. PhD 1968 from University of Cambridge, UK. Professor at University of California, Berkeley, USA.
•  Michel H Devoret, born 1953 in Paris, France. PhD 1982 from Paris-Sud University, France. Professor at Yale University, New Haven, CT, and University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
•  John M Martinis, born 1958 in the USA. PhD 1987 from University of California, Berkeley, USA. Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

AR Wonderful work. Congratulations all round.

 

⦿ Amir Cohen/Reuters
Smoke rising over Gaza on Sunday
President Trump urges negotiators to "move fast" in talks focused on the release of hostages
held by Hamas in Gaza and a broader end to the war.
 

2025 October 6

Trump's Message to US Military

Sidney Blumenthal

No dictator has ever assembled before him the entire senior officer corps of his armed forces in order to have them belittled as failures and humiliated for their slovenly personal appearance, while degrading whole classes serving in the army, navy, and air force as inferior and unworthy.
"I've never walked into a room so silent before," Trump said when he addressed America's highest-ranking military leaders at the Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday.
Trump cannot grasp that the silence of the commanders during his address to them demonstrated their highest duty. Their discipline showed fidelity to their oath to the constitution. They are loyal not to Trump but to his constitutional role.
Trump's inability to understand their stolidity showed his incomprehension not only of the military but the presidency under the law. He told them they were to be his agents for a new war to be waged against his perceived political opponents at home, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
Trump's executive order of September 22 designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 on September 25 cited the murder of Charlie Kirk and other events as pretexts: "This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents [but] a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns."
According to NSPM-7, a new "national strategy" would be implemented against an ideology of "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality."
The senior generals had been gathered at Quantico on the order of secretary of war Pete Hegseth, who was the warm-up act. He wanted to pardon or grant clemency to service members accused or convicted of war crimes. He said the military should not fight with "stupid" rules of engagement.
Hegseth: "It's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals .. It's a bad look .. You might say we're ending the war on warriors."

AR Time for the officer corps to stage a military coup in America.
 

2025 October 5

Christian Nationalists in America

SPIEGEL International

Douglas Wilson was long regarded as an extremist eccentric even among conservative evangelicals. As Christ Church founder, he aims for an "American theocracy" in which biblical law applies.
Wilson is now the idol of many Christian nationalists, which believe that America was made exclusively by and for protestant Christians. They say the Holy Bible justifies misogyny, homophobia, racism, and white supremacy. Many MAGA leaders are possessed by their Christian spirit.
Trump: "We want to bring God back into our beautiful USA like never before."
Texan televangelist Lance Wallnau says Trump is "God's chaos candidate," anointed by the Almighty for a "special purpose." Many Christian nationalists say he was sent to destroy "demon-crats" and their evil, liberal worldview.
Project 2025 is a blueprint for an authoritarian redesign of the United States into a nation rooted in the Bible. The many Christian nationalists among its authors imagined a country full of evangelical Christian families led by a strong patriarch, where abortion and homosexuality are shunned, where public schools are replaced by Christian schools, and where science is replaced by faith.
Trump has laid the groundwork for almost every idea outlined in Project 2025: the slew of executive orders, the raids on migrants, the attacks on schools and universities, the shifting of wealth to the already rich, the vengeance unleashed on his political opponents − all of it serves the systematic creation of a God-fearing nation.
Trump's spiritual adviser Paula White: "President Trump is not only making America affordable, prosperous and strong again − he is making our country faith-centered again."
Trump: "My life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again."
US secretary of war Pete Hegseth recently shared a video on X in which his mentor Douglas Wilson calls for abolishing women's right to vote.
Wilson: "Trump is like chemotherapy. It's toxic, but it kills the cancer before it kills you."

AR The MAGA movement is morphing into a tragic, toxic disaster not only for Americans but also for enlightened citizens across the western world, if not the entire world.
 

2025 October 1

How the Brain Balances Excitation and Inhibition

Yasemin Saplakoglu

In the mammalian cortex, the vast majority of neurons are either excitatory neurons that trigger other neurons to fire or inhibitory neurons that stop others from firing.
Excitatory and inhibitory neurons work in similar ways. Most release neurotransmitters, which travel across synapses and dock onto receptors on the next neuron. What distinguishes excitatory and inhibitory neurons is the type of neurotransmitters they release.
Excitatory neurons release glutamate when they fire. Glutamate triggers a bunch of positive ions to flood into a neuron, increasing its internal voltage and spurring it to fire an action potential.
Inhibitory neurons release a neurotransmitter that triggers negatively charged ions to flood into the next neuron or positively charged ions to flood out, inhibiting the next neuron from firing.
Excitatory neurons vastly outnumber inhibitory ones. But throughout mammalian brain evolution, inhibitory neurons have diversified and increased in quantity, suggesting they play critical roles.
Inhibitory neurons inhibit specific cells. For example, they fire less when an animal is near a food location, thus enhancing the desired signals.
Both excitatory and inhibitory neurons fire in milliseconds. Neuromodulatory neurons are much rarer in the brain and work more slowly.

AR Interesting summary of basic facts, but important for understanding how the brain manages the balancing act of staying near criticality (blog 2025-09-07).

 

⦿ Eleanor Lutz
The Solar System
(with radial log scale)