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Ninety One Percent Not Rubens

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  A museum discovers its beloved masterpiece is a flawless forgery. Nothing on the canvas changes. The thing the visitors lost was never on the canvas, and the machines we built to keep it safe cannot hold it either. Two canvases, the same brushwork, opposite receptions. The wires run to the placards, not to the paint. In November 1937 Abraham Bredius, the most respected Vermeer scholar alive and seventy-nine years old, published a notice in The Burlington Magazine about a painting shown to him in Monte Carlo. It was a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art, he wrote, to be confronted with a hitherto unknown work by a great master, and he was inclined to call this one the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft. The painting was The Supper at Emmaus. Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam bought it that year for a figure usually given as 520,000 guilders, raised from the Rembrandt Society, the shipowner W. van der Vorm, several Rotterdam collectors, and Bredius himself. In 1945 a pa...
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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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