Catégories
The tradition founded by Freud: unconscious conflict, defence and transference, and the clinical method built on them. Its standing in empirical psychology is contested and much of the original theory has not held up, but it remains a living body of clinical and theoretical scholarship, and its influence on the humanities is large in its own right.
The mental processing of language: how sentences are understood and produced in real time, and what the errors and delays reveal.
The scientific study of mind and behaviour, from perception and memory to personality, development and disorder.
What religion does to and for a person: conversion, ritual and prayer, religious experience, and the cognitive habits that make belief easy.
The measurement of mental attributes: how a test is built, what makes it reliable and valid, and the statistical models behind a score.
The state as an organisation: bureaucracy, public service delivery, accountability, and what the reforms that borrowed from business actually did.
The state in the economy: taxation, public spending, redistribution, and the market failures that are used to justify intervention.
Health at the level of a population: sanitation, vaccination, screening, health systems, and the policy that pays for them.
What publics think about politics, how those attitudes form and move, and how well surveys can measure any of it.
How policy is made, chosen and evaluated: agenda setting, instruments, implementation, and the gap between what a programme intended and what it did.
The lungs and breathing: asthma, chronic obstructive disease, infection, and respiratory failure.
Quantum mechanics applied to molecules: electronic structure, chemical bonding, and the approximations that make the Schrodinger equation tractable for real systems.
Computation that uses superposition and entanglement as resources, together with the algorithms and error correction that make it usable.
Quantum mechanics and special relativity taken together, with particles as excitations of underlying fields. The framework the Standard Model is written in.
The physics of matter and energy at atomic and subatomic scales, governed by probability amplitudes.
Light treated quantum mechanically: photon statistics, entanglement, and the interaction of single atoms with single photons.
Observation at radio wavelengths, where pulsars, masers and the cosmic microwave background are visible and optical light is not. Includes interferometry and the very large arrays it needs.
Analysis on the real line: sequences, series, limits, and the construction of the integral.
Mathematics pursued for the pleasure of it: puzzles, games, magic squares and the rest. It has its own journals and a long line of serious results that started as amusements.
Learning a policy from reward rather than from labelled examples, by acting in an environment and observing what it returns.