This post is about how it is important to avoid taking rigid pedagogical attitudes while teaching. Having associated with academia (as a student and a professor) for almost 50 years now, I have come across several teachers who proclaim various types of unbending attitudes which they sincerely believe in and proudly implement in the classroom. I feel these actions are sub-optimal, if not downright disastrous for some students, as teaching is an art which requires open and fle

This post is a review of the book D. D. Kosambi: One Life, Many Worlds by Ram Ramaswamy, an academic whose own research lies in nonlinear science and computational biology. As the name suggests, the book is a biography. Kosambi was a polymath, making original and distinguished contributions to mathematics (e.g. Kosambi-Cartan-Chern theory, which analyzes second-order differential equations), genetics (e.g. the Kosambi mapping function), numismatics, (Marxist) history, literat

This post is a review of the book Crick: A Mind in Motion by Matthew Cobb. I found three motivations, not in order of importance, for reading and reviewing this book. First, after covering a biography of Watson, I thought it would be appropriate to read and review a bio of Crick. Second, this biography advertised i

This post is about a preprint I recently came across on the scientific arXiv: Retaining Earth’s Habitability Beyond the Life of the Sun by Gabriel Harry. It offers several 'mega-engineering' solutions to the problems likely to arise, e.g. from the million year expiry date on the Sun and the difficulty of transporting civilization via interstellar voyages to other solar systems (or roaming around in spaceships indefinitely). The paper identifies 7 main threats and their propos

This post is a short review of the book The Great Archaeologists (2014, 304 pages), edited by Brian Fagan. The book is a collection of biographical portraits of about 70 pioneering archaeologists, written by prominent professionals in the field. Each entry is short (about 3-5 pages) and the book moves along at a clip. It's strength in my opinion is in the breadth of coverage it provides. I have listed some of the categories I enjoyed finding in the book. Usual suspects: The

The book reviewed in this post. This post is a review of the book Chasing (a) Conjecture (2025) by C. B. Khare. Khare, in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger, solved a famous outstanding problem in mathematics, known as Serre's conjecture. The book details this quest for the popular reader (largely), but also contains a literary history of the author's personal and professional development as a mathematician. I thought the book was really well written (no ghost writer

This post is about why I love writing grant proposals for getting my research funded. Not all academics do. I have come across many who consider grant writing as a chore and a necessary evil which interferes with the real business of actually doing science and publishing the work (some even hate writing papers; it's only the investigative process that really gets them excited). The facts that proposals require much work and many if not most of them get rejected also add to th

This post addresses a complaint I often hear and read about: namely that some physics professors, after a certain stage of their careers, no longer do calculations themselves (if they are theorists), or actually spend time in the laboratory tinkering with the apparatus (if they are experimentalists). Instead of performing any practical work, they become managers of students and postdocs and collaborations, overseeing the work of those who carry out the actual scientific labor

This post is about the necessity and advantages of academic travel. Before I enumerate them, a few images from Darmstadt where I visited the Technical University. The Wedding Tower A Russian church in the Waldspirale - no two windows (Hochzeitsturm) - a major Vortex Garten. are the same. attraction in Darmstadt. Background Some colleagues travel during the semester while they are teaching courses. They maint

This post is a review of the book Antimatter: What it is and why is it important in Physics and Everyday life by Beatriz Gato-Rivera. I had been looking for a book on the topic for a while and I found it displayed at the workshop I am attending in Spain. Then I was able to access it online. Before I start the review, some photos I took of the village of Benasque. A road in the village From across the river At the conference This is

Tony Leggett This post commemorates Sir Anthony 'Tony' Leggett, who was awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 2003 (along with V. L. Ginzburg and A. A. Abrikosov), for making pioneering advances in our understanding of physics at low temperatures, and who passed away recently (1938-2026). Leggett's major contributions included explaining the superfluidity of Helium 3 (an outstanding problem in physics), and pioneering the study of macroscopic phenomena (he was among the firs

This post is a report on my visit this week to the city of Valencia in Spain. I was invited to give a talk at the Nanophotonics Technology Center which is part of the Polytechnical University in Valencia. Some highlights from the visit, which concludes tomorrow: The Center: The NTC is a center for telecom research, with advanced facilities, but also has two functioning companies situated in its building. These companies grew out of the research at the Center. I gave my talk i

This post is about the recent observation of entanglement of quarks at the Large Hadron Collider, published in Nature. This is the detection of entanglement at the most fundamental level in the universe ever probed by human beings (quarks are, as far as we know, the smallest constituents of matter), and at the highest energies. Entanglement Entanglement is the existence of correlations (between two or more physical systems) which cannot be explained using classical physics, a

This post is a review of Sisters in Science by Olivia Campbell. It is a book about 4 women physicists who were able to escape the Nazi regime in Germany and (re)build successful careers in other countries. These were Hedwig Kohn (a spectroscopist), Lise Meitner (nuclear pioneer), Hildegard Stucklen (spectroscopist) and Hertha Sponer (physical chemist). The first two had to flee because they were Jewish and all of them had to flee because they were women (Nazi rule opposed aca

This post is about the following, perhaps radical, conjecture: that, without education, human beings would essentially be animals of some type. Education, for the purpose of this post, is not just degrees, but any kind of systematic training. My views on this - and I have no qualifications in biology, behavioral science, psychology, etc. - are based solely on my experience as an educator. This is in fact, a vast topic, but I thought I should make a beginning at some point in

Imagine Today Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival 2026 was held, mostly indoors with driving rain outside. Imagine is the tech fair of my university, and today had more than 400 exhibits and 3000 exhibitors. On a fair weather day, there are about 10,000 attendees; I am not sure there were that many today, though I had to circle around for a quite while to get parking. Some editions (not today's) run into two days and generally I find the number of exhibits so lar

This post is a review of the quaint little (156 pages) popular science book The Periodic Kingdom by P. W. Atkins . When I was an undergraduate, I had loved the clear expository style of his textbook on quantum mechanics. Though he is a chemist (retired from Oxford) the book was very accessible for a physics student like me. Atkins is in fact an excellent pedagogue and has written about 20 books, some of which are considered market leaders (e.g. Physical Chemistry is a clas

This post is about review articles in physics. Below I will put down my philosophy about what reading and writing such articles involves. What they are : Review articles are useful but somewhat unusual objects, in that they do not represent original research, like most published papers, but rather a summary of (usually recent) developments in a field. Why they are useful to the reader : Review articles are useful to researchers looking to get into a new area of physics. This

This post is a review of the book Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms by Carlo Cercignani (329 pages), and includes a preface by Roger Penrose. Boltzmann was one of the all time great physicists, and the founder of the discipline of statistical mechanics. He showed how to quantify the second law of thermodynamics, with the equation named after him. He was the first to give a statistical definition of entropy, a formula famously inscribed on his gravestone. He was

This post is about one of my favorite topics: academic peer review. I have written about it before, comparing different fields , and suggesting alternatives . Today I will state my analysis of some classic characteristics that I think most reviews of low quality share. I am writing this in the hope that it will be helpful to people just entering the process. It is often not until much later in their careers that they begin to analyze the defects and recognize them and acquire