Aeon in Motion
The theme of this newsletter is Foundations.
Many people ask us about fundraising, and the answer is straightforward: yes, we are fundraising, actively pursuing conversations and working toward the right partnership. But our approach looks different. This isn't about 15-minute pitches on Zoom calls with a slide deck—we're building long-term relationships with people who deeply care about advancing the technoscientific enterprise, assembling a coalition that shares a conviction that the shape of science funding itself needs reimagining.
As capital managers, entrepreneurs, and fund LPs ourselves, we know that initiatives of this magnitude require significant resources. But we need partners who understand that getting the foundations right matters more than moving fast. We believe generative wandering is essential to transformative discovery, and that belief applies to institution-building, too. You cannot build a long-horizon investment platform by rushing. Early decisions compound: the first capital partner shapes expectations, the first evaluation norms shape what kinds of people show up, the first signals shape reputation. If those parameters are misaligned, the trajectory starts to shift.
We are unwilling to bake short-termism into the DNA of an institution meant to counter it, which means three things matter deeply to us in this phase:
- First, approach. "First, do no harm" applies institutionally. It is possible, even with good intentions, to recreate the very pressures we hope to relieve: premature legibility, performative milestones, subtle risk aversion. Avoiding that requires care.
- Second, community. We are not assembling a crowd but building scaffolding. The people around Project Aeon, whether advisors, contributors, or supporters, will help set its norms. If this is to be a place that protects divergent thinking, the foundation must reinforce that posture from the start.
- Third, capital. Money is not neutral. It carries a time horizon, a temperament, and a theory of accountability. The right capital partner is not simply one who believes in science but one who believes in generative wandering and understands what that implies.
Our tempo, then, is a choice that signals what we value. Our approach is a demonstration that if we are serious about restoring generative wandering to science, we must be willing to practice it in the construction of the institution meant to protect it.
Of course we want to raise capital and support exceptional scientists—that matters!—and the sooner we can do that, the better. But our goal is larger than closing a fund or backing a cohort: we aim to reverse the trend that science and technology operate within increasingly narrow lanes, where optimization and efficiency tend to collapse the search space.
If Project Aeon is to do that credibly, it must embody that stance from the beginning. We are designing, deliberately and with care: refining sourcing, pressure-testing evaluation frameworks, and shaping institutional scaffolding. Project Aeon itself is a seed, and seeds require the right soil, the right environment, and patience.
The Idea Garden
What makes a good theory?
This piece links to an interdisciplinary workshop where researchers from cognitive science, neuroscience, AI, philosophy, linguistics, and more came together to ask: what criteria define a strong scientific theory, how do we assess it, and which processes help good theories emerge? By highlighting the diversity of perspectives and the thoughtful reflection on theory construction and evaluation, it nudges us to take the practice of theorizing more seriously—not just the empirical grind.
Which Future?
In this long essay and talk, Michael Nielsen examines how we navigate transformative technologies—especially artificial superintelligence—by looking at historical surprises like Castle Bravo and the latent dangers revealed by deep scientific understanding. Rather than offering simple risk-versus-benefit trade-offs, he argues that as our grasp of reality deepens, both power and peril grow inextricably linked, and that meaningful progress requires institutions and ideas that can increase the supply of safety as fast as we expand the frontier of discovery. A wide-aperture reflection on how to steward the long arc of technology thoughtfully
Artificial Intelligence Tools Expand Scientists' Impact but Contract Science's Focus
Using a pretrained language model to detect AI-augmented research across 41.3M natural-science papers, this study finds a stark divergence between individual and collective outcomes. Scientists who use AI publish more, earn more citations, and reach leadership earlier—yet the overall topic landscape contracts, with fewer distinct areas explored and less cross-engagement among scientists. A sharp articulation of a new tension: AI may amplify personal productivity while quietly collapsing the search space of science toward data-rich, already-established fields.
A Reality-Based View of Government Funding of Science
This back-and-forth between analysts and an experienced NIH scientist models the kind of honest, detail-oriented debate the field needs. Rather than caricatures or anecdotes, it digs into real constraints and incentives—from reporting burdens and amendment procedures to how grant scope really works in practice—and probes where perceptions about bureaucratic barriers align with reality and where they don’t. By separating myth from experience, it pushes the conversation about trade-offs in public funding toward clearer understanding of what actually helps or hinders scientific exploration.
Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality
This essay explores how great scientists often follow intuition and aesthetic sense—the vibe of a problem—rather than pure rationality alone, with examples ranging from Einstein to controversial figures like Fred Hoyle. It argues that intuitive insight has repeatedly driven radical leaps even when it later misfires, and suggests that today’s systems undervalue the psychological and aesthetic dimensions that help fuel deep discovery.