Beyond Quanta
Finding Peter Putnam
Nautilus
“How could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity?” Amanda Gefter asks in her deliciously compelling feature about Peter Putnam. A student of the great physicist John Wheeler who wound up working as a janitor, Putnam “really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century,” according to one physicist who worked with him. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam — they’re three peas in a pod. But one of them isn’t recognized.”
Gefter tracked down storage units full of Putnam’s papers and sought to get to the bottom of his “brain calculus” — a theory of the mind that science now seems to be catching up to, and which might potentially help explain and improve today’s powerful AI models. “I might have walked away,” Gefter writes, “if I hadn’t been struck with the same feeling that had taken hold of everyone else: that Putnam was actually onto something.”
A Strange Fascination
Science
Quanta didn’t report many breakthroughs in condensed matter physics in 2025, but incremental progress remains steady in that vast subfield, which concerns solids and their dizzying variety of properties and behaviors. For a dose of coverage from elsewhere, read Savitsky’s feature article about “strange metals.” In certain crystalline materials, the strange-metal phase is a precursor to high-temperature superconductivity; many specialists suspect they’ll have to crack what electrons are doing in strange metals before they can hope to control superconductors. Several theories have been posited recently about this phase of matter. It seems that “electrons” might not be the relevant vocabulary. Savitsky quotes the late physicist Jan Zaanen, who said that when it comes to strange metals, “it cannot be emphasized enough how misleading the very idea of a particle is.”