Scientists and Debt

Great Scientists Follow Intuition And Beauty

Erik Hoel | Seeds Of Science | 3rd December 2025

“The abstract machine of science is an open system. We can be rational about choosing between different hypotheses, different ideas, or different experiments. But rationality does not actually tell you, by itself, what makes for a good hypothesis, a good idea, or an elegant experiment. Those choices include some strange blend of aesthetics, intuition, passion and other irreducible qualities” (1,400 words)

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Debt Shaped The Way We Speak

Colin Gorrie | Dead Language Society | 10th December 2025

The words “owe”, “should” and “debt” reveal how “English built its way of expressing duty, necessity and obligation — not to mention guilt and sin — out of the raw materials of accounting”. Old and Middle English words that denoted some form of actual debt have become modal verbs of obligation, instances of concrete words being worn down into abstract bits of grammar through use (3,600 words)