Samir Varma
Physicist, hedge-fund founder, and author.
I study systems that are deterministic, hard to predict, and impossible to ignore: particles, markets, AI, and human choice.
PhD theoretical physics, UT Austin · Author of The Science of Free Will · Co-Founder of VS Asset Management · Inventor on eight US patents
Now — as of October 1, 2026
Physics
The Letter on four-Goldstone-boson inelasticity in custodial partial waves is out in Physics Letters B (September 2026). Data and code on Zenodo. Working on what comes after.
Economics
Dead-band Monetary Policy: A Practitioner's Case against Point-targeting is out in Business Economics (September 2026; free read). A second paper, on the economics of a luxury-destruction ban, is under review; SSRN preprint live.
Writing
Weekly. Direct, first person, no PR voice — physics, AI, free will, markets.
Trading
Running Risk Timing® at VS Asset Management — long-term US equity exposure with explicit drawdown management.
Book
The Science of Free Will
How Determinism Affects Everything from the Future of AI to Traffic to God to Bees. Foreword by Tyler Cowen.
Physics is deterministic; you have no free will in theory. But the universe is computationally irreducible; you have perfect free will in practice.
“Free will is the absence of being able to predict what will occur.” The book shows why both are true at once — and what that means for AI, ethics, justice, and the bees.
Praise
I am delighted to see this work come to fruition. Samir Varma breaks down barriers in this fascinating book on determinism … you are part of the causal chain steering your actions in complex, unpredictable ways.
A wonderfully entertaining case for determinism. I learned a lot about wave functions, computability and Artificial Intelligence … I learned a lot, enjoyed the book, and I predict you will too!
An intellectual tour-de-force … weaves an exhaustive interdisciplinary study through science, mathematics, computer science, and philosophy. With compelling evidence and insightful caveats, it challenges readers to reconsider the boundaries between determinism and human agency.
Recent writing
-
The Emperor Has No (Prime) Factors
Sep 28, 2026
The fourth in a series auditing the stories quantitative finance tells itself.
-
Your Thermostat Knows Something the Fed Doesn't
Sep 21, 2026
The Fed fine-tunes at a scale its tools cannot resolve, and it slept through the loudest alarm in forty-five years. Same mistake.
-
The Price of an Assumption
Sep 14, 2026
Everyone knew it was an approximation. Nobody had computed the error.