Dear Magicians,

Students ask me about astrology more often than I let on.

Not because they believe it. They’re testing me — watching to see if the astrophysicist will perform skepticism. The eye roll. The Wikipedia citation. The condescending exit.

I don’t perform it.

Astrology is fraud. The mechanism doesn’t exist. The predictions are unfalsifiable. Saying Jupiter shapes your personality because it’s large is like claiming a photograph of your grandmother smells like her perfume.

But dismissal is the cheapest move available to a scientist.

The more interesting question — the one I’ve been asking for 25 years inside institutions — isn’t whether a framework is wrong. It’s what got quietly removed to make it tidy.

What the Babylonians Quietly Dropped

The sun doesn’t pass through 12 constellations each year.

It passes through 13.

Astronomers have known this since antiquity. The 13th is Ophiuchus — the Serpent Bearer — occupying roughly 19 days of solar transit between Scorpius and Sagittarius. If your birthday is between Nov 30 and Dec 17, you’re not a Sagittarius – you’re an Ophiuchus! Bet you never knew that. But even if you did, there’s absolutely zero reason to be upset. It’s there. It’s real. It shows up in any honest accounting of the sky.

The Babylonians dropped it around 700 BCE. Not because it conflicted with observations. Because it conflicted with their calendar. Twelve signs for twelve months. Symmetrical. Administratively elegant. Nobody pretended it was science. The editors just needed the numbers to work.

Ophiuchus has existed quietly ever since. Real. Ignored. Absent from every horoscope ever written.

Your Field Has One Too

The frameworks you inherited — in your discipline, your institution, your professional training — were built by editors who also had calendars to fill. Who also needed clean numbers. Who also chose symmetry over completeness.

What they dropped wasn’t wrong. It was inconvenient to count.

Physics did this with the aether: removed it elegantly, then quietly reinstated subtler versions — dark energy, inflation, quantum vacuum — because the equations still needed something there. Academia did it with replication: dropped as a norm for decades not because it didn’t work, but because it didn’t produce papers. Medicine did it with effect sizes that complicated the story.

The word isn’t fraud. The word is curation.

And curation, practiced over generations by people with institutional interests, produces consensus frameworks that are tidier than reality. Frameworks with an Ophiuchus somewhere. Frameworks where the count is quietly off by one.

The question isn’t whether your field dropped a 13th sign. It did.

The question is whether you’re allowed to count it.

The Action

This week: pick one framework you use automatically — a mental model, a professional heuristic, a piece of received wisdom from your training. Ask what the 13th sign would be.

Not what’s been debunked. What’s been quietly dropped for symmetry. What got edited out because it didn’t fit the calendar.

You don’t have to tear the whole thing apart. Just acknowledge the count is probably wrong.

The Cosmic

Ophiuchus won’t be added to the zodiac. The astrology industry runs on 12 signs, and administrative inertia defeats astronomical accuracy every single time.

But the ecliptic doesn’t care what the calendar says.

The sky has always had 13.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian

PS. Reply to this email if you’re an Ophiuchus… I know for a fact 5% of you are!

M — Musing

Years ago, an email landed in my inbox from someone I didn’t know.

Poetry professor. Wanted to talk about quantum mechanics. Offered to buy me a coffee.

My first reaction was uncharitable.

I can buy my own coffee.

I get a version of this email regularly — someone with a theory, a question, a paper they want me to read, five minutes they want to pick my brain. The offer to buy coffee is usually a politeness, not a negotiation. And I was, at that moment, a busy physicist with a full calendar and a clear sense of which conversations were worth having.

I almost didn’t reply.

Then I noticed she had won the Pulitzer Prize.

Not for physics. For poetry. Which, if I’m being honest, didn’t immediately change my calculus — poetry and quantum mechanics occupy different epistemic neighborhoods. One trades in compression and ambiguity. The other in testable prediction.

Or so I believed.

I agreed to meet.

Assumptions vs. reality

The conversation didn’t unfold the way I expected.

She wasn’t trying to understand the math.

She was trying to understand what the math feels like — how physicists live with uncertainty, probability, superposition. What it means to describe reality with symbols that resist ordinary language.

It was a different vector of inquiry.

Not less rigorous — just orthogonal.

We talked about measurement, indeterminacy, the strangeness of observation shaping outcome. She translated ideas I usually express in equations into compression, metaphor, rhythm.

I realized something subtle:

Physics reduces the universe to its most economical description.

Poetry attempts the same for experience — with the additional constraint that the description must be felt, not just verified.

I’m not sure which is harder.

The part I almost missed

In 2014, Rae Armantrout went on to teach a course called Poetry for Physicists — a title that would have sounded implausible to the earlier version of me who nearly ignored her email.It was (and sadly remains) the only time a UCSD course was offered in both Literature and Physics Departments.

Later, one of her poems &mdash Accounts— sparked, improbably, by that coffee meeting — was selected for Best American Poetry of 2012 … and she dedicated it to me!

I sometimes think about the thin contingency there.

A few seconds of impatience, and that entire chain of events disappears from my personal universe. No conversation. No course. No poem.

From my perspective, it would have vanished without a trace — because the most significant missed opportunities leave no observable signal.

They look exactly like nothing.

A recurring pattern

This is the unsettling part.

The near-miss didn’t feel dramatic at the time.

It felt ordinary. Efficient. Reasonable.

That’s how cognitive filters work.

They protect attention by discarding what seems low-value.

But filters optimized for survival aren’t optimized for discovery.

In physics, the breakthroughs hide in anomalies — the data points you’re tempted to throw away.

In life, they often arrive as emails you almost ignore.

The mirror I didn’t expect

I think about Rae Armantrout’s email when I read the messages I now receive from people who want five minutes and offer to buy me coffee.

My instinct is the same as it was then.

Busy. Full calendar. Low prior probability that this particular conversation will go anywhere.

I haven’t solved the cognitive filter problem. I’ve just become the physicist on the other side of it.

Which is why I now hold office hours at $1,000 per hour — every dollar to charity — not as a revenue mechanism but as an epistemological one. If you’re willing to put real skin in the game, I’ll take the meeting as seriously as I should have taken Rae Armantrout’s email the first time I read it.

Book office hours →

The price buys a lot of coffee.

More importantly, it removes my judgment from the equation — which, as it turns out, is the variable most in need of calibration.

The uncomfortable implication

I’ve almost certainly already declined the conversation that would have mattered most. So have you. The counterfactual is permanently inaccessible. The experiment cannot be rerun.

The wavefunction collapsed, and neither of us was measuring.

That’s not a reason for paralysis. It’s a reason to treat your own cognitive filters with the same skepticism you’d apply to a measurement instrument you haven’t calibrated.

Notice the instant a quiet dismissal forms. Then ask once:

What discovery am I about to filter out?

Most of the time, nothing important happens.

But occasionally someone offers to buy you a coffee, and the universe gets slightly larger because you said yes.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian

Dear Magicians,

Before anything else: the Epstein files are, first and foremost, a record of victims. Children who were trafficked, exploited, and failed by every institution that should have protected them. We need accountability, and fast, if society is ever to recover from this.

• Orange jumpsuits, handcuffs, extensive prison time
• Guilty pleas; no back room deals
• Large monetary settlements

Now, what follows is about the scientists — but the scientists are not the story. The victims are. And they deserve more than a passing mention in a newsletter about academic complicity.

With that said.

I’ve spent most of my life arguing that science and rationality are our best hedge against self-deception. That the examined life is the only one worth living. I’ve never conflated knowledge with wisdom — A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (a 2006 visitor to Epstein Island along with dozens of other scientists) is no more a guide to moral living than the Bible is a textbook on precision cosmology.

And then three million pages land on the internet and you watch some of the smartest people alive demonstrate, with exquisite clarity, that intelligence is no vaccine against stupidity.

The DOJ’s January 2026 Epstein file dump confirmed what many suspected but hoped wasn’t quite this bad. Nature reported that Epstein kept a curated list of nearly 30 top scientists. Not acquaintances. Not people he’d met at a cocktail party. Scientists he cultivated. Maintained. Deployed.

These were not backwater institutions thirsty for money — although Arizona State, a public university, topped the list in dealings with Epstein. These were places like Harvard, where multiple luminaries, including several past podcast guests and former president Larry Summers, turned out to be repeat presences in the files.

And then there’s me.

I didn’t Google myself this time. I Epstein-filed myself. To my horror, my name appears in at least 13 documents, including multiple emails sent to Epstein.

Two sources: I spoke at a 2017 consciousness conference in San Diego alongside Epstein’s favorite intellectual, Noam Chomsky, so my name was listed among the speakers. And my book agent, John Brockman, had one of the most extensive intellectual relationships documented in the files. Because I wrote for Brockman’s website, Edge.org, I found myself featured there too.

These appearances are relatively mild. But the shock gave way to disgust. Was there anything I could have done to prevent even the pixels of my name from crossing his inbox? I don’t know. What I do know is that whatever discomfort I feel is nothing — nothing — compared to what his victims endured.

According to Nature, the universities now implicated span at least a dozen of the most prestigious institutions on Earth: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale, Duke, Princeton, Arizona State, NYU, Columbia, the Santa Fe Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard alone received roughly $9 million and is launching its second investigation. Because the first one apparently didn’t investigate hard enough. Shocking — that an institution investigating itself might lack a certain enthusiasm for the task.

So why did so many brilliant people fall for this? I think about this a lot. Partly because “brilliant people being idiots” is a subject I have personal expertise in.

Three forces converged.

First, chronic underfunding. Academic science runs on scarcity. This is not a metaphor. Researchers spend a staggering percentage of their careers begging for money. Writing grants. Getting rejected. Writing more grants. And then a billionaire materializes offering millions with no bureaucratic overhead, no six-month review cycle, no forms in triplicate. The rational response is suspicion. The human response is relief. When you’ve been drowning, you don’t interrogate the guy throwing you a rope.

Second, status capture. Epstein didn’t just write checks. He hosted salons with Nobel laureates. He brokered introductions to powerful people. He created an ecosystem of intellectual flattery so intoxicating that serious minds confused proximity to wealth with evidence of their own importance. Scientists — people professionally trained to distinguish signal from noise — mistook “a predator finds you useful” for “you have arrived.”

Third, institutional moral outsourcing. If MIT and Harvard accepted his money, it must be fine. If Harvard hosted him in his own office on campus, someone must have vetted him. If a department chair is having dinner with the man, surely the ethical due diligence was done.

It wasn’t.

Nobody did it. Everyone assumed someone else had. The same psychological mechanism that explains why people don’t call 911 when there are thirty bystanders. Diffusion of responsibility. Except instead of failing to call for help, they were accepting checks from a convicted sex offender.

Now. I find the impulse to moralize from the cheap seats genuinely distasteful. It’s very easy to look at this wreckage and say, “Well, I would never.” Maybe you wouldn’t. But you probably haven’t spent a decade scrambling for funding while your lab’s future hinges on a government panel that meets twice a year.

The point isn’t that all these scientists were evil. Some may have been. Most were ordinary — ordinary in exactly the way that allows moral catastrophe to unfold. Not through malice. Through convenience. Through the slow erosion of standards when everyone around you is making the same compromise.

The fix isn’t complicated. It’s uncomfortable. Which is why it hasn’t happened.

Mandatory donor transparency. Independent ethics review of private philanthropy above a meaningful dollar threshold. And most critically: formal ethics education for scientists. My colleagues in the medical school, law school, and even the MBA program have mandatory ethics courses at every level. Scientists? At my university, we have nothing. We have biannual online training with anodyne examples about fudging lab data and video courses about avoiding conflicts of interest and sexual harassment — all of which merely require a 2h attention span and a working mouse… That’s it.

How is ethical judgment supposed to develop? By osmosis? We need to mandate these courses — and we need to get over the arrogance that tells us we don’t need them.

Your need for money is the handle by which you can be grabbed. Know the handle exists.

Brilliance without ethical vigilance is just useful naïveté. And useful geniuses, it turns out, were exactly the product Jeffrey Epstein was shopping for.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian

Dear Magicians,

Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In fact, that’s the origin of the name “Monday M.A.G.I.C. Messages”!

But here’s the thing Clarke didn’t say: any sufficiently honest scientist is indistinguishable from a student.
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Yesterday was Galileo’s birthday — 462 years ago. This week I’ve been thinking about Galileo’s book The Assayer—his 1619 masterpiece of scientific rhetoric. In it, Galileo declares nature is written in the language of mathematics. Beautiful. Revolutionary. And also the same book where he got comets completely wrong.
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Galileo insisted comets were atmospheric illusions—optical tricks of reflected sunlight. Tycho Brahe had already proven, through precise parallax measurements, that comets were celestial bodies far beyond the Moon. Galileo dismissed him anyway. Why? Partly because Tycho’s cosmological system wasn’t pure Copernicanism. Partly because Galileo was stubborn. Mostly because even geniuses are human.
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Einstein made similar mistakes. He called the cosmological constant his “greatest blunder”—then dark energy resurrected it. He spent decades chasing a unified field theory while ignoring quantum mechanics. He dismissed gravitational waves as mathematical artifacts. LIGO proved him wrong in 2015.
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The Stoics had a practice called dokimazein—assaying coins to test their authenticity. Merchants could hear the difference between real and counterfeit by the ring of the metal. We do the same with hundred-dollar bills, rubbing them, holding them to light.
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But how often do we assay our own ideas with the same rigor?
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The lesson isn’t that Galileo and Einstein were frauds. The lesson is that even the greatest minds require friction to find truth. The mistake isn’t being wrong—it’s refusing to test the coin.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian