FreakTakes

Home
Podcast
ARPA Playbook
Engineering Innovation
Shorts
About
An Alternative Approach to Deep Tech VC
Marrying early YC's goals with systems from the mid-20th C. deep tech pipeline
 • 
Eric Gilliam
5

May 2023

Math and Physics’ Divorce, Poetry, and the Scientific Slowdown
An alternative hypothesis to the 'burden of knowledge' theory of the slowdown
 • 
Eric Gilliam
11
Thomas Edison, Technical Entrepreneur
My piece in Works in Progress
 • 
Eric Gilliam
2

April 2023

How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
 • 
Eric Gilliam
3

January 2023

A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology
This piece is noticeably longer (twice the length) than the others on this Substack. This is because 1) it is a practically-oriented historical…
 • 
Eric Gilliam

December 2022

October 2022

Irving Langmuir, the General Electric Research Laboratory, and when applications lead to theory
To this point, I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this Substack covering the work of scientists from the early-to-mid-1900s — a golden era of…
 • 
Eric Gilliam
How Karl Compton believed a research department should be run
And how DeepMind might be doing it
 • 
Eric Gilliam
1

August 2022

July 2022

A Progress Studies History of Early MIT— Part 2: An Industrial Research Powerhouse
Each piece in the MIT series can stand alone for the most part, but I’ve written them in such a way that they build off each other. So, I’d recommend…
 • 
Eric Gilliam
1
A Progress Studies History of Early MIT — Part 1: Training the engineers who built the country
The MIT Series Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen opened their 2019 Atlantic piece that helped jump-start the progress studies movement with the following…
 • 
Eric Gilliam
Coming pieces from the Engineering Innovation Substack
And a piece you might love that you probably missed
 • 
Eric Gilliam
© 2024 Eric Gilliam
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture