Matthew Watkins
Unaffiliated/uncorrelated writer, AI safety researcher and (lapsed) mathematician. Prolific DJ and occasional radio ghost known as Professor Appleblossom. For decades I've cheerfully stumbled from one thing to the next, writing about and recording some of it — this is the front door to a lot of that.
SolidGoldMagikarp
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
When English mathematician Matthew Watkins went to San Francisco to study an early version of ChatGPT, he expected dry technical work. Instead, he uncovered a series of ‘rare tokens’ that made the system go haywire. Some produced gibberish. Others turned it hostile. One trigger word — petertodd — sent the machine into what looked like full-blown paranoia. Was it a simple bug? A trail of breadcrumbs left by whistleblowers? Or a glimpse into how AI really thinks?
The search for answers pulls Watkins into the secretive world of AI safety research — a window into the eerie inner worlds of LLMs, and a cryptic clue to what might be history's greatest power grab.
Other books
SolidGoldMagikarp is above — here's the rest, spanning twenty-five years.
Secrets of Creation trilogy
Words by Matthew Watkins, pictures by Matt Tweed. Grew out of two long-running web projects — the Number Theory and Physics Archive and Inexplicable Secrets of Creation. Three volumes, originally conceived as one ~1000-page book: The Mystery of the Prime Numbers (2010, 362pp), The Enigma of the Spiral Waves (2012, 249pp), and Prime Numbers, Quantum Physics and a Journey to the Centre of Your Mind (2013, 275pp) — tracing prime numbers through the Riemann Hypothesis to quantum chaos.
You Are Here
An “accelerating history” of Canterbury from the Big Bang to noon on 15 August 2014, sliced along a logarithmic spiral timeline into ever-shrinking intervals — the final 24 hours alone take up almost a quarter of the book. Three illustrators cover three eras: Matt Tweed (Big Bang to Bronze Age), C.J. Watkins — Matthew's mother — (Bronze Age to 2014), and Juliet Suzmeyan (the final day).
Useful Mathematical & Physical Formulae
A pocket maths-and-physics reference published in the popular Wooden Books series, later licensed by Walker & Co. (NYC), translated into several languages, and folded into Wooden Books' Sciencia compendium alongside five other titles.
Music, DJ sets & broadcasts
Two standalone archive pages, built to be shared, downloaded and kept as durable snapshots independent of whatever platforms host the actual audio.
Broadcast Archive
Eight programme rooms of playlists, write-ups and embedded Mixcloud players, drawn from years of broadcasting as Professor Appleblossom.
Enter the archive ↗Music Archive
A searchable interface onto roughly 328 Internet Archive collections spanning decades of musical projects and collaborations.
Enter the archive ↗Videos
Music films, mixes and recorded talks. Curated highlights and embedded playlists to be added here.
Visit the channel ↗The ruins
Every town worth visiting has some ruins on the outskirts. These sites are dead or dying, and deliberately left that way — preserved as found via the Wayback Machine rather than rebuilt, tidied up, or ported into the new site. Untampered with, warts and all.
Secrets of Creation
Author bio, the full Watkins/Appleblossom speaking-engagements page, and the trilogy's own pages (volume details, illustrator story, ~25 reviews, acknowledgements, news timeline) — left exactly as they were. Only a handful of quotes were pulled out for use above; the rest just sits here for anyone who wants to dig.
Exeter University homepage
Career bio, academic publications (including two previously-thought-lost papers), and the undergrad dissertation PDF, recovered while the page still stands. A batch of personal “things I find interesting” essay links (Hoyle, P.K. Dick, Borges, etc.) was also saved — archived, but deliberately left unlinked from this site.
You Are Here
Synopsis, illustrator credits and a whole page of real reviews (see Read, above), all preserved as found. The old purchase/contact pages used a custom cart and a Gravity Forms embed, both long defunct — not reproduced here.
The Spring
An old personal music blog — gig diary entries, obituaries, odd memories (My Bloody Valentine at Reading '89 among them). Technically still online, but abandoned since 2021. Several of the recovered Talks links above point back to it.
Visit ↗The Watkins Objection
In 1996 Matthew challenged the numerology behind Terence McKenna's “Timewave Theory” and its 2012 prediction. McKenna himself coined the term “Watkins Objection” for the critique. This is Matthew's own account of it, written in 2010.
Read it ↗The RetroPsychoKinesis Project
A parapsychology research project Matthew founded as a student, investigating whether mental intention could influence pre-recorded random events. Still online, hosted by John Walker at Fourmilab — but the original Java-applet experiments no longer run.
Visit ↗Elsewhere online
Matthew Watkins
Matthew Watkins was born in London in 1970 and completed a PhD in mathematics at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1994, followed by a Royal Society fellowship at Ghent University. Disillusioned with academic specialisation, he then spent five years travelling — playing the saz (a seven-stringed Turkish instrument), composing and recording music, planting trees, and chasing interests in Clifford algebras, the I Ching and the parapsychology of time. A chance fascination with the distribution of prime numbers, beginning in Ávila in 1995, pulled him back into serious mathematics and led to the Number Theory and Physics Archive and, later, the Secrets of Creation trilogy.
He has held an honorary research position at Exeter University and taught part-time at the University of Kent at Canterbury. In 2004, with mythogeographer Phil Smith, he received the British Association for the Advancement of Science's first-ever arts commission in its 173-year history. Since the mid-2000s he has performed as the freestyle lecturing alter ego Professor Raphael Appleblossom at festivals including WOMAD, Secret Garden Party and Smugglers Festival — also DJing, producing the monthly podcast Canterbury Sans Frontières, and appearing (demonstrating the Banach–Tarski paradox) in a Deerhoof music video.
More recently: AI safety researcher. While studying language models at SERI-MATS in Berkeley and London, he discovered ‘a cluster of strange keywords that will break ChatGPT’ (Vice). His posts about the research, published on the tech-rationalist website LessWrong, were among the most upvoted in the site's history — the subject of his forthcoming book, SolidGoldMagikarp.
coming soon…
Speaking
Recovered from an old speaking-engagements page archived on the Wayback Machine (secretsofcreation.com, captured 10 Feb 2020) — so this runs from 1999 up to early 2020. More recent talks exist and will be added. Some events are undocumented; where a recording is known to exist but isn't linked yet, that's noted rather than hidden.