it’s science is for people who suspect that a living cell, a thinking brain and a quiet mind share a common root.
Every week, one idea from science, followed slowly: from something you can picture to the cell, the brain and the mind reading it. Around a thousand words, ten minutes with your coffee, no physics degree required.
Try one, right now
Stir a glass of muddy water and leave it alone. The grains sink, the water clears, and it looks as if order has come back by itself. It has not. Each grain that falls gives up its height to the water as a little warmth, and the glass slides toward the state with the most entropy it can reach. Once it gets there, nothing more happens. A living thing is exactly what does not do that.
Twenty seconds ago this was a glass of dirty water. Now it is a question about what keeps you alive. That is what these essays do.
Start with these
What a Bit Actually Is
On a Saturday evening in February 1946, a new program went out on the Mutual Broadcasting System from a theater on West 48th Street in New York. Four panelists. One hidden object, mailed in by a listener. Twenty questions, each answerable only yes or no. The show was called Twenty Questions, and it ran, in one format or another, for the better part of a…
The Price of Forgetting
In a laboratory in Lyon, in 2012, a group of physicists built the smallest memory anyone had ever built, and then measured what it costs to wipe it.
Still Water Is Not a Quiet Mind
It is three in the morning and your mind will not settle. The afternoon’s conversation plays again, with better lines this time, and behind it come the email you forgot to send and a number that still does not add up. Nothing arrives in order. It all comes up at once, like silt kicked up from the bottom of a glass, and hangs there in the dark.
Read in this order, they make one argument: what information is, what it costs to forget it, and what that means for a mind. Every essay is free.
How it works
One essay a week, usually on Thursday. Each one takes a single idea (a bit, an experiment, a formula) and follows it until it reaches life and mind, never further than the evidence goes. Where a claim is still a hypothesis, the essay says so.
Who writes this
I’m Tommaso Firaux. I study how energy, mass and information weave together to produce living systems and, sometimes, minds that wonder about themselves. My research sits at the intersection of biophysics, neuroscience and complex systems. I write in English and Italian, depending on where the thought takes me.
it’s science publishes one essay a week on a single idea from physics, biology and neuroscience: information and entropy, energy and memory, cells, brains and contemplative states. Each essay starts from a concrete scene and follows the evidence no further than it goes. The science of life and mind, in ten minutes a week.
Questions
Do I need to know physics? No. Each essay starts from something you can picture and explains what it uses along the way.
Is it free? Yes. Every essay is free.
Can I write to you? Please do. Reply to any email, or leave a comment under an essay.
What happens when I subscribe? One email a week, usually on Thursday. No digests, no filler in between.
What if I want to leave? There is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email. No hard feelings; keep the glass of water.