Eric Betzig

I used to think this 20 years ago, coming from a background in chemistry and physics and having done research in biophysics. In principle, biology is governed by physical laws. However, I’ve come to learn that framing progress in biology primarily in terms of missing mathematical theory does not capture the nature of the problem. Biological systems are not like simple fluids, particles, or quantum systems where a small number of variables and approximations for interactions make governing equations intuitive and predictive. They are closer to cities, automobiles, or societal systems — high-dimensional, adaptive, and historically contingent, where interactions are not cleanly separable and the relevant variables are often unknown or context-dependent. In that setting, equations like Navier–Stokes or Schrödinger are useful for framing intuition, but are not the path to prediction. Progress tends to come from iterative application of the scientific method through decomposition and reconstruction — perturbing systems, building models, and using simulation to approximate behavior. AI will accelerate that paradigm by automating hypothesis generation, model building, and simulation. But it does not remove the core constraint: progress is limited by the quality, structure, and interpretability of the underlying data, and by our ability to extract signal from an increasingly noisy literature.

On March 16th 1926 Robert Goddard launched just first liquid fueled rocket. 42 years later rockets would carry humans around the moon.

Complexity is everywhere. Yet people pretend to be able to predict complex systems.

On this day, 55 years ago, Robert Wise's "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) was released in the USA & Canada. The visual impact of the dreaded microscopic organism was deemed so vital to the suspense drama, that $250,000 was allotted for the creation of special photographic effects by Douglas Trumbull of '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) fame, and James Short. Trumbull “imagineered” the germ’s appearance, which in the story was seen on microscope and computer viewing screens at enlargements of up to one million times. ("Photographing The Andromeda Strain", Jon Bloom, American Cinematographer, 2020)

The science funding system is BROKEN. PhDs and professors are spending their days writing grant proposals rather than conducting research that could transform millions of lives. And the worst part? The system REWARDS predictable, safe, incremental science. It PUNISHES radical ideas and moonshots.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz just called the EU a "complete failure" in front of global elites by stating, "Germany & Europe have wasted incredible potential. We have become the world champion of over-regulation & zero growth."

It's not adequately understood that the ISS has delivered zero groundbreaking research, despite grandiosely being declared a National Laboratory. It is by far the worst return on investment ($100B and counting) of any modern scientific endeavor.

Las Vegas Sphere celebrating the Blood Moon eclipse last night 🌕

Satya Nadella just said what the entire industry is too invested to admit. Every CEO signing $100 billion data center contracts right now is making a bet that history may not honor. Nadella: “We are one sort of innovation away from the entire regime changing.” Right now, every major player is running the same play. More data. More GPUs. Bigger clusters. Same architecture. They’ve convinced themselves scale is destiny. They’ve convinced themselves the biggest balance sheet wins. They’ve convinced themselves this is a resource war. It’s not. Nadella: “If you look at where we’ve gone, it was all about pre-training scale, then it was about post-training, then we came up with reasoning, then we said, ‘oh, there’s RL.’” The architecture isn’t stable. It never was. It’s been mutating the entire time. Each shift rewriting the rules. Each breakthrough making the previous moat irrelevant. And the companies that didn’t see it coming didn’t get a warning. They just woke up behind. Nadella: “A new model architecture that could even be more efficient in its performance.” When that lands, the $100 billion clusters don’t matter. The hoarded GPUs don’t matter. The multi-decade infrastructure advantage doesn’t matter. Every castle built for the current paradigm becomes a monument to the wrong bet. This is what makes the AI race unlike anything in history. In nuclear competition, more warheads meant more power. The advantage was permanent. Cumulative. Compounding. In this race, one person with the right insight at 2am in an apartment somewhere erases a trillion dollars of infrastructure before the market opens. No warning. No negotiation. No second place. The most dangerous competitor in this race doesn’t have a data center. They just have the equation.