First-Principles Reasoning

Six physics lectures with little maths: atoms, energy, gravity and quantum behaviour.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

A father and son's motorcycle trip framing an inquiry into what Quality means.

Why structures hold up or fail: tension, compression, shear and fracture explained.

A history of discovery: time and the clock, the earth and seas, nature and society.

Stories of a physicist's first marriage and his inquiry into the Challenger disaster.

Reality through four strands: many-worlds physics, computation, evolution, Popper.

How the sciences and humanities can be unified by causal links from physics up.

How scientists came to know what they know, from cosmology and geology to biology.

Einstein's life and science, from the Bern patent office to relativity.

Knowledge can grow without limit through good explanations that are hard to vary.

Thought experiments and other tools a philosopher uses to reason carefully.

What physics, biology, psychology and other fields teach about investing.

How calculus works and how it made modern technology possible.

Early specialisation works only where rules are stable; elsewhere breadth wins.

Bacon's utopia of organised research; science as an institution

Survey of what humans have known, era by era

Mental models from physics, biology and psychology, applied to investing.

The search for the periodic table; reasoning from the elements upward

History of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance

Short essays on the scientific concepts most worth adopting