Anil Ananthaswamy

Don't know how other authors feel, but seeing the first physical copy of your book, after years of looking at Word files and PDFs... Seems surreal. It's as if someone else wrote it... Anyway, this advance copy arrived in the mail. One more month to pub date ...penguinrandomhouse.com/books/677608/w…
#artificalintelligence @DuttonBooks

Theoretical Computer Science Meets Its AI Moment

The day after OpenAI dropped a bombshell about "a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and
smoothness problem," 32 theoretical computer scientists met for a 2-day closed door meeting (that had been planned for months) at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, to discuss and debate their field's response to AI. In this issue of the @SimonsInstitute's annual magazine, Polynomial Times, is my report of that meeting. Read the article and the entire issue here: t.co/zMXmxcSKWj

The 2026 Nobel Prize for Physics

"We built it, and we'll see what comes," Francis Halzen told me back in 2007. IceCube was his Field of Dreams. Today, the dreamer and the instrument win the Nobel Prize in Physics. I visited the South Pole in 2007 to observe IceCube being built and wrote about it in The Edge of Physics.

An excerpt from the book:

IceCube has turned the icy wastes of Antarctica into a neutrino physicist’s field of dreams. “Everybody thinks something will be seen at a cubic-kilometer scale,” said Halzen. “I’m not responsible for what is emitting neutrinos in the universe. We developed the technique, we built it, and we’ll see what comes.”

IceCube is venturing into the unknown. It’s a discovery instrument, not unlike the proposed Square Kilometre Array or the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. These behemoths will serve physics for decades, peering through the mists of time to let us glimpse our very beginnings.

Edward Wilson, who accompanied [Robert Falcon] Scott to the South Pole and died with him on the way back to McMurdo, might as well have been speaking about the IceCube scientists when he penned these words during his brief sojourn in Antarctica:

And this was the thought that the Silence wrought
As it scorched and froze us through
For the secrets hidden are all forbidden
Till God means man to know,
We might be the men God meant should know . . .

"We built it, and we'll see what comes," Francis Halzen told me back in 2007. IceCube was his Field of Dreams. Today, the dreamer and the instrument win the Nobel Prize in physics. I visited the South Pole in 2007 to observe IceCube being built and wrote of an entire chapter on it in The Edge of Physics. An excerpt:

One of my favorite American authors, Annie Dillard, is no more. Her books, especially Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Writing Life, were a big part of my decision to give up software and turn to writing. nytimes.com/2026/09/16/boo…