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Latest — Dec 18, 2025

A Stationary Action is Stable Information

There is a maximum amount of information that any observer can extract from a physical system. This limit emerges from the structure of phase space itself. A system's state occupies a region defined by its position and momentum, and quantum mechanics forbids this region from shrinking below a

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The Hard Problem as Hidden Relationality

There is a pattern in the history of physics. A puzzle appears insoluble for generations. Brilliant minds propose baroque solutions — new entities, hidden mechanisms, radical revisions to metaphysics. Then someone notices that the puzzle rested on an unexamined assumption. Remove the assumption, and the puzzle doesn't get solved.

It from Bit, Bit from It

If you have ever felt uneasy reading about quantum mechanics, you are in good company. For nearly a century, the idea that a cat can be both alive and dead — or that an electron exists in a cloud of probability until "looked at" — has struck even world-class physicists

The Synchronization Tax

A physicist, a computer scientist, and a banker walk into a bar. They cannot agree on who got there first. This is not a joke. This is a central problem of physics, computer science, and economics. The physicist points out that simultaneity is relative — who was there "first"

Estimation Culture

Reason recently published a lovely article by Davidson Heath about the history of statistical significance and estimation. I enjoyed the article very much, but I'm afraid that even for people who use the tools described in the article in their day-to-day work, the message might be a little

The Causal Arrow of Altruism

I recently explored group selection and kin selection models in an essay on Radamacher Complexity and Group Competition, attempting to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable differences using measures of model Rademacher Complexity. The essay chose to use the definition of group selection provided by Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson (NTW) 2010, which also

Rademacher Complexity and Models of Group Competition

What do Radamacher Complexity and mean field approximations have to do with kin and group selection models in evolutionary biology? And what might consideration of the Radamacher Complexity of kin and group selection models suggest to us about cooperation and competition in human groups? Here are tentative answers to what

The Coasean Singularity in Patents

Patent rights exist to solve a fundamental economic problem: Inventors need incentives to innovate, but after revealing an invention, others can copy freely. The patent system grants limited monopolies to inventors in exchange for public disclosure. This is the patent system as God intended. But the patent system has struggled

What is creativity?

Csikszentmihalyi's book Creativity is one of my favorite books, and one of my favorite insights from the book is his systems theory of creativity. Creativity is not a characteristic or trait of an individual person or work. Rather, it is a phenomenon manifest in the incorporation of an

Invention as Exploration

Richard Sutton's Bitter Lesson is that general methods leveraged by more computation beat specialized intuition encoded in domain-specific algorithms. The Bitter Lesson gets lots of attention these days because of its implications for artificial intelligence. But for a patent lawyer like me, it's more interesting for