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Bose, Schrödinger, and the Determinism Debate

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Gained knowledge, lost faith: S. N. Bose, Schrödinger, and the 1944 determinism debate In October 2026, a physics historian in Geneva, Flavio Del Santo, published three handwritten pages that had sat in the Schrödinger Archive in Vienna for more than 80 years. The title on the first page was "Collapse of Determinism." Most of the coverage ran it as a lost manuscript with a twist. Schrödinger, the man usually filed next to Einstein, had built a hidden-variable model. That is the kind of thing a determinist builds. The twist that caught me sits a few paragraphs further into Del Santo's paper. He names the two talks that restarted the determinism debate in the 1940s. One was E. T. Whittaker's Guthrie Lecture in London in May 1943. The other was Satyendra Nath Bose's presidential address to the Indian Science Congress in Delhi on 3 January 1944. A report on Bose's address ran in Nature in July 1944 under the same title Schrödinger later us...
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Three Years in the Zendo

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Why I sat down For three years I sat on a black cushion for 40 minutes every morning before the rest of the house woke up. I was not looking for peace. I was looking for a way out of my own head, which at the time was running a debugger on everything, including itself. The years were mid 1993 to early 1997 and the place was Singapore. I had taken a contract as a communications software engineer, which in practice meant one thing: designing a TCP/IP stack and retrofitting it onto OS/2, which by the autumn of 1994 had become OS/2 Warp. IBM was betting the operating system on networking, and the networking was late. I spent my days inside RFC 793 and RFC 1122, arguing with retransmission timers and a 16-bit device driver layer that had never expected to carry a 32-bit protocol stack. I had come to Zen the way engineers usually come to anything: sideways, through a book. I was reading about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and kept running into the ...
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Every path counts - Feynman's postulate leaves the blackboard Every path counts - Feynman's postulate leaves the blackboard For 78 years the sum over histories was a calculation we trusted but never watched. A single-photon experiment has now measured the paths themselves, and the idea sits underneath more of today's technology than most engineers realise. Dr. Sanjay Basu, A Technocrat's Discernment Every path from A to B One photon at a time, two slits Space: every path a photon could take Amplitudes: one arrow per path, added head to tail ħ, relative 1.00 All paths Only near-straight Block near-straight Replay Close the lower slit Fire faster Clear the screen In 1948 Richard Feynman published a strange instruction for predicting where a q...
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