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The setting I am currently attending a workshop in Spain, in the town of Benasque. The town is in the center of the Pyrenees, a mountain range at the border of France and Spain. The location was likely chosen so as to prevent the scientists from getting distracted by big city attractions and to get them to talk more with each other: the building in which the workshop is being held has hallways lined with blackboards, small rooms designed to nucleate discussions, and large halls for talks, poster presentations and coffee sessions. The surprise Things became exciting in the morning session of the second day: in the middle of the talk the seminar room started to shake - an earthquake! It turns out - I was not told this prior to committing my attendance - that Benasque is in a seismically active area. I should have guessed though, as it is in a mountainous region (see below). As if to confirm, a second tremor, which I felt clearly in my hotel room, came at about 1 am the same night. Prior to this, I had experienced mild earthquakes in my home in Delhi, and have been fascinated by earthquakes for a while (some would say due to my inclination towards damage prevention and control). Below, I address some of the basic questions I have encountered in my study of earthquakes. Some questions and answers i) Why do earthquakes occur? The Earth's uppermost land layer is the lithosphere, which is about 100 km thick. The crust of the lithosphere is made of chunks called tectonic plates. The lines where these plates meet are called faults. When the plates move against each other; elastic strain is first built up at the fault and then released in the form of kinetic energy. This release of energy is what constitutes an earthquake. Mountains also form when plates collide and their boundary crumples (the Pyrenees were formed by the collision of the Iberian and Eurasian plates; the Himalayas formed where the Eurasian plate collided with the Indian plate). This is why mountainous areas are seismically active. ii) What is the epicenter? The earthquake originates from a location inside the Earth's crust; this point is called the hypocenter. The point on the Earth's surface directly above the hypocenter is called the epicenter. iii) What kind of physics describes earthquakes? The transport of kinetic energy along the Earth's crust basically takes the form of acoustic wave propagation. These waves obey Huygen's principle: every point on the wavefront serves as a source of waves itself. Seismic waves are of two types: body waves that travel within the earth; and surface waves, that travel, well, on the surface of the earth. Body waves compress and expand the rock (these are called P or primary waves, as they are the first to arrive during an earthquake); or they can shear the rock (S or secondary waves; these arrive later). By measuring the time delay between the P and S waves the distance from the seismograph to the epicenter can be calculated. Surface waves come after the body waves. They can move the rock side to side as they travel (Love waves) or move the ground in an elliptical pattern (Raleigh waves). For those interested in more, mathematical modeling of earthquakes is described here. iv) What is the Richter scale? This scale measures the logarithm of the amplitude of the largest wave in an earthquake recorded by a seismograph. Typically notable earthquakes are strong (6.0-6.9), major (7.0-7.9), great (8.0-8.9) or extreme (9.0-9.9). Although in principle the Richter scale has no upper limit, the maximum value ever recorded is 8.6 (Chile, 1960). The tremors I experienced in Benasque and Delhi were likely 'slight' (3.0-3.9). Apparently there are 100,00 of these events per year, worldwide. v) Can earthquakes be predicted? Not with certainty, only through probabilities, like weather forecasts. In this context, it is interesting to recall how some scientists were initially convicted of manslaughter for not giving out severe enough warnings before the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy. They were subsequently acquitted. vii) Are earthquakes ever beneficial? Maybe if you are out bowling and its your turn to bowl. More seriously, earthquakes seem to have benefits for soil enrichment (by bringing fresh nutrients to the surface), and for concentration of ores (gold!).

In my almost twenty five years in American academia, I have only heard of one case (all assertions in this post will refer to my field, unless indicated otherwise) where someone was hired as a member of the faculty right after completion of the PhD. Even the superstars have to spend a year or two doing postdoctoral work before they can join a department as a professor. For most faculty hires, three postdoctoral stints are not unheard of (that was the case for me), with an average total of six years between award of the doctoral degree and start of a tenure- track position (also true for myself). Postdoctoral years are therefore a crucial time in the career of an academic physicist. Since RIT does not yet have a doctoral program in physics, I have been relying mainly on postdocs for executing my research since I joined in 2011. This means I have mentored about 10 postdocs since joining - and I am currently looking to hire a couple more. Perhaps this gives me some credentials for speaking about functioning as, as well as supervising, a postdoctoral associate. The first thing, in my opinion, that should be emphasized about being a postdoc is that it is very different from being a graduate student. Graduate school, as I indicated in my previous post, is an apprenticeship. During this time, the student is being trained in the techniques of the field, and becoming familiar with the literature. The ideas are mostly - at least initially, and in many cases all throughout - laid out by the thesis advisor. Typically, the student studies a single area of physics - if not a single problem - in depth, and produces one or two papers a year. Of course, there are exceptional students who take much more initiative and publish at a vastly higher rate. As a postdoc, the expectations are rather different than as a graduate student. In my field a competent postdoc is expected to produce 3-5 papers in a year. I am not much better than competent and I was producing about 6 in a year, back around 2007, about fifteen years ago; the standards are higher now. It is allowed, of course, to have co-authors on these papers, and to be first or only author on only a subset of them. But the point is that a postdoc producing at the rate of a graduate student would be a disaster for the program hiring him/her and not very competitive on the academic job market. One may of course object - what if (s)he writes a single brilliant paper a year? My answer to that is - how many such postdocs do you know, and who went on to get a faculty position? Only a few, I am guessing, if any. In my group I spend a lot of time weaning postdocs fresh from their PhD's, away from their graduate student habits. After all, it is not easy to give up something you have been doing for half a decade. For example, they may want to spend months writing an internal review paper. I then have to tell them as a postdoc everything they do needs to be publishable. (I used to have a postdoc advisor who told me that there are people who read papers and there are people who write papers - but of course this does not mean we should not read papers.) Another example is when they are totally engaged with a single project. I have to tell them that at any point a postdoc needs to be involved in 3 projects - they paper they are writing up, the paper they are calculating, and the paper they are thinking up the idea for - and reading up on. A postdoc has to learn up new subjects and techniques quickly and start being productive. (S)he has to learn how to collaborate effectively, and supervise graduate and undergraduate students in a productive manner. (S)he has to quickly learn how to become creative in a new field. Time management and efficiency are much more crucial than in graduate school. Research-wise, the postdoctoral phase is probably the most intense period in the life of an academic. It requires total immersion in scientific research. At the same time, during this phase, the other demands which professors typically have to face - grantsmanship, teaching, sitting on committees, travel for giving talks, hosting visitors, outreach, and so on - are absent. A typical postdoctoral stint lasts for two years. Take six months at the beginning for coming on board, and six at the end for wrapping up and finding a new position. With journal reviews and decisions taking months to turn around, you can calculate how much time is left for initiating and finishing physics projects.

Background Towers have an interesting connection to physics. Of course, physics is crucial to their construction (prominently in Gothic cathedrals; but see also these interesting towers of tennis balls and human beings; and test your practical tower-building skills with a game of djenga). Some towers have historical connections to physics as well - Galileo is said to have conducted his experiments on mechanics from the leaning tower of Pisa; Pound and Rebka performed their test of Einstein's principle of equivalence in a tower at Harvard university. Motivations In spite of suffering from acrophobia (fear of heights - when my family moved from a second story to a fourth story apartment it took me a month to come out on the balcony) as well as claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces - the stairways leading up the towers are usually cramped; I get breathless in the back seat of an SUV), I find myself climbing towers wherever I visit for physics conferences and talks. Maybe it is the view that is tempting - I have always been a big picture person and love taking in panoramic eyefuls of the lay of the land. In any case, here are some interesting experiences I have had with towers (for those interested in more, there is a World Federation of Great Towers): Tower stack i) The Hallgrimskirkja: Shaped like a space shuttle about to take off, this is the most prominent architectural landmark in Reykjavik. I particularly enjoyed the lovely view of the city and the bordering ocean. ii) Taipei 101: The first tower I saw with earthquake and typhoon-proofing in the form of a huge concrete ball suspended down the center to counteract tipping over (the Wikipedia article has a photo of the ball, or for the technical folks, the mass damper). iii) Sydney Tower Eye: Really tall (apparently the second tallest in the Southern Hemisphere). Gives amazing views of the Harbor and the Bridge. The skywalk - to get on it you have to be rope-chained to the rail - has a transparent floor letting you look all the way down to street level: I didn't go on it, it was a bit too much for me. iv) Eiffel Tower: No list would be complete without this one. The view is great, of course, but to a technical person it might also be interesting to read off the names of prominent French scientists inscribed on the sides: Fourier, Cauchy, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Fresnel, Ampere, Legendre, Fizeau, Coriolis, Foucault, Carnot...- 72 of them. If you take the picture on your phone, like me, you will have to expand to full size for the inscriptions to be legible. v) St. Vitus: The south tower on this cathedral in the royal castle lets you geographically decipher all of Prague from the maps posted at the top. The clapper on the huge (15 tons) and famous bell Zikmund is said to crack (so the bell falls silent) whenever a disaster is about to strike. The clock escapement mechanism is visible and I was hypnotized by it. vi) La Sagrada Familia: I went up the Passion (and not the Nativity) tower on this landmark cathedral designed by the famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. Great views of Barcelona city and the Mediterranean. The elevator takes you up and you get to climb down a rather narrow and unlighted stairwell. vii) Acropolis: This is not formally a tower, but I included it in the list as it shared several features in common with a tower: I had to climb a lot, stunning architecture was involved, and the view of the city (Athens) was magnificent. The word itself - acropolis - roughly means 'high point'. In a similar category is Sravanabelagola in India, which is capped by an enormous statue of Bahubali. (I did not have the guts to do the climb in a litter carried by four men; the steps seemed to be a safer bet). Bucket list Some towers I would like to see (or see again): i) Burj Khalifa: the tallest structure in the world, located in Dubai. The closest I came to it was when I visited Abu Dhabi. Not close enough. ii) Leaning Tower of Pisa: For reasons obvious (physics-based) and perhaps not so obvious (as an example of how an imperfection can make something famous). iii) CN Tower: It's just across the border, in Toronto, but I've never managed to make it there on any of my visits to the city. iv) Qutub Minar: I am told I visited it as a child. I would like to go see it again, and climb its 399 steps, but the tower has been closed to the public since 1981 when 45 tourists died in a stampede after the stair lighting failed. If cell phones had existed back then those lives would probably have been saved.

A few days ago I was informed that my first - hopefully not my last - scientific patent has been granted. Prehistory Some people might think I should have a few patents already, considering that I have been a professor for about twelve years now. My excuse is that patents are not given for abstract ideas (the things theoretical physicists are best at producing); but rather for inventions of devices or processes, which fall more naturally into the domain of experimental physicists. Maybe there are more theoretical physicists who hold patents now, but when I was in school and college the number was so few that I remember only a few historically important exceptions. Einstein has some patents, including a fridge and a light-intensity adjusting camera. Feynman had none. Dirac refused to participate in the patenting of a uranium-enrichment process that he had helped develop. Interestingly, when I was a postdoc in Maryland, I used to live down the street from the US Patents and Trademark Office in Alexandria, VA. I also remember meeting a classmate from university who used to work there. A few years into my faculty position I revisited the USPTO specifically to see the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is on the ground floor. Among many interesting exhibits I remember a Mustang convertible on display which consisted of half of an old model seamlessly joined to a more modern model making up the other half, both sides with steering wheels. History Of course, my patent would not have been possible without the participation of my co-inventor, Nick Vamivakas at the University of Rochester, the experimentalist who turned the theoretical proposal into an experiment. As we had already published the first paper before we applied for the patent, this one had to be a US and not an international patent. The process was a bit more involved than usual as two universities were involved, but the IP people were able to coordinate well. First, paperwork internal to the two respective institutions was filed in 2020. Then an application was submitted to the USPTO. A provisional patent, basically notice of filing, was granted by the USPTO (2021). Finally, a patent was granted on March 5, 2024. As can be seen from the patent pdf available online, the patent focuses on 'prior status' (what had been done before), the working of the device, and future applications. Future Though we were not focused on producing an 'off-the-shelf' commercial version, nor does the invention has any 'killer app' immediate applications, we found about ten companies which are capable of developing these platforms. So we are hopeful someone will pick up the technology. The patent expires in 2042. So we have about 18 years to get rich! Actually since patents take a while to get adopted, it is not recommended that one patent an invention as soon as it is made; rather, the strategy is usually to wait a few years so that the patent license gathers revenue at its peak utility, or at least as it goes up in value. However, in our case, it was not clear when the product would peak, so we just decided to file anyway. (Not basing my retirement on this patent -:). Other patents Some famous patents (lightbulb, telephone...) can be found here. 'Patent wars' - have been fought in court, for monetary reasons, bragging rights, etc. for a long time. Today, in our heavily industrialized society, they are quite commonplace: for example, Apple and Samsung have spent large sums of money suing each other over infringement of patents in various countries. Presumably, the monetary benefits far outweigh the legal costs.

This post addresses some questions I am commonly asked by my non-academic friends. Readers working in academia may also find some familiar themes here. If they are bored by my descriptions, I apologize. i) What do you do on weekends? Short answer: Being employed in academia, single and without kids, there is not much of a difference between week days and weekends for me. Long answer: Mine is not a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday job (nothing wrong with those). I do not: punch a clock, have a boss to report to daily, have to be on campus (unless I am teaching class or attending non-Zoom meetings), or have to be online from home for a certain number of hours during any day. If I need to get vaccinated on a weekday, or get my car serviced, or have music practice to attend, or take the pet to the vet (I do not have a pet), I can do it by scheduling around my hard commitments. Sometimes I prefer to work at home if I need a very quiet atmosphere for deep thinking, usually when I am trying to do some serious physics. In short, my job gives me a lot of flexibility; so I can be doing things during the week that people generally do on a weekend. This should not be interpreted to mean that I do not have much work to do. On the contrary, I am almost constantly busy (I have heard it said that an academic's most precious resource is time). It's just that my work is not constrained by any formal hours. For example, I could be working nonstop during the weekend on a proposal for obtaining funding. After the proposal is submitted on Monday, I could keep the Tuesday workload light for recovery. Since I am a theoretical physicist, I can - and do - work when I am driving to lunch, taking a shower, jogging for exercise, waiting at the airport, flying on a plane, etc. (I once wrote a paper while attending to my mother's stay at a hospital). I also have a bunch of international collaborations, and timezone arrangements often mean that I end up having Zoom meetings quite late at night (~11pm-3am). So I could be catching up the next day by sleeping in a bit in the morning or by taking a nap in the afternoon. Also, the job is quite a bit stop-drop-and-roll. If a physics idea seems to be coming into my head on Friday evening, I might not go out to attend a concert I may have planned on earlier (actually Friday evenings are often when I get my best ideas, when the department is empty and dead quiet); or if the idea overflows into Saturday, I am not going to to stop just because 'it is the weekend' - I don't want to duck out via the fire escape when inspiration is knocking at the door! Besides, the excitement is too pleasurable. I hope it is clear that work is not work for me, it is play, because I love every aspect of it. Therefore the concept of a 'work-week' does not make sense in my case, and I suspect, for a good many of my colleagues as well. And an academic job (for me at least) is not a job, it's a lifestyle. A similar question I am often asked is 'what do you do during vacations?' (the four months we get off when the students go home in the winter and summer). The answer: the same things I do over a weekend. (A joke I can't resist quoting: the only thing shorter than a weekend is a vacation). ii) We just want to make sure you are not doing physics all the time - right? Short answer: That would work fine, too. Long answer: There is actually nothing wrong - and perhaps everything right - with doing physics 'all the time'. Physics is a tremendously deep, satisfying, enthralling, exciting, fun-imbued activity which supplies meaning, entertainment, and foundational balance to my life. It can be solitary or social, analytical or computational, agreeable or controversial, aesthetical or useful, deep or playful, modern or ancient....at any given time, including right now, I have a huge stack of books and papers on physics that I can't wait to get to. The whole subject is like a playground littered with toys! iii) When are you thinking of retiring? Short answer: Not anytime soon. Long answer: Many people consider work as a kind of rite of passage which they undergo in order to earn a salary, become financially independent, etc., so they can retire as soon as possible and finally do the things that they really want to do. What do they really want to do? Follow their intellectual inclinations, control their schedules, travel, interact with interesting people... But I am doing all that right now! Why would I want to retire? I can read and publish on any topic I like; as I mentioned above, my schedule is almost completely determined by me; I travel all over the world giving talks, attending conferences and workshops (I was in France in March, will be in Spain in May, Turkey in June, and India in July, just to give a flavor), and interact with extremely bright students, colleagues, visitors and professionals locally, nationally, and internationally. It's a party!

The motivation While I am nominally a professor of physics (someone who has expertise in practicing physics), I sometimes feel like a professor of excuses (someone who has expertise in recognizing excuses). One of the side effects of teaching, mentoring, grading and assessing undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs for almost fifteen years at a university is that I have become intimately familiar with an impressive variety of excuses made by people who present their work to me. To be sure, the majority of students are a complete pleasure to work with, and are models of punctuality and conscientiousness, the kind of people you would like to clone. But there is a good number who regularly generate a spectrum of excuses, ranging from the mundane to the spectacularly lurid. I flatter myself that I have arrived at a stage where I can tell - already when the student or postdoc is standing at the door to my office, but has not yet entered, sat down, or started talking - how much work they have done and what level of excuses they will employ. Their body language usually gives it all away. Below I present a partial list, assembled to give a flavor to my students (so they know not to use these and similar excuses); maybe some others will also find it useful: A list of samples i) Dr. B, I could not do the work because: I was studying for my finals (they are three weeks away)/my computer crashed (the modern equivalent of the dog-ate-the-homework excuse)/I had too much project work due (the project teachers told me the student was not handing in any work to them either)/if I had taken time out to do the work assigned to me I would have lost my job or become homeless. ii) Dr. B, I could not come to class because: the carpet at home caught fire (the arsonist could not be traced)/the tread on my car tires was so shallow it would have been dangerous to drive to school/I had to go to the doctor (a prescription is never available)/I had to go home for a funeral (often several times a semester, casting doubts on family longevity)/I am in love with a classmate and I feel terrible attending class because her boyfriend is also a classmate. iii) Dr. B, I want you to know that I am working really hard on the course material. This is usually advanced by a student who is not near the top of the class. It's kind of cute that they don't realize the professor can see them coming from a mile away. Also, a straightforward rebuttal doesn't usually work; one has to reply in the same coin as the student, something like: 'And I want you to know I am working really hard on giving you a good grade'. iv) Dr. B this is such a stupid mistake I made on the exam: A classic move used by a student who wants me to reply: 'Oh that's not so bad - here's an extra point to make you feel better.' Conclusion An excuse is more than a mechanism for justifying the absence of a result; it is a technique for avoiding taking responsibility for our own actions. No genuine professional - or human being - does that. But since we are weak, we are not always strong enough to take responsibility - I can recall instances from my own childhood when I could and would produce excuses effortlessly. Getting out of this habit, and taking responsibility for our actions, requires conscious practice and cultivation of character. Just so we don't get too serious about this I will end by linking some amusing excuses reported by other teachers.

Motivation It has been difficult to avoid the excitement over the solar eclipse predicted to occur on next Monday, April 8, because i) Rochester, NY is in the path of totality (the eclipse is coming to us!). ii) My departmental colleagues who are astronomers have been putting out fascinating information about the event (here's an excellent sample, due to Prof. Michael Richmond). iii) Such events occur once in about a hundred years; so once in a lifetime. iv) Any laziness or lack of enthusiasm I might have shown (after all optics people like me are rather used to seeing light sources getting blocked by objects) had to dissipate after friends with family forecast their intentions of showing up at my place for the viewing. I caved in and went out and bought eclipse glasses. Mention should also be made of other friends and members of my extended family, who are traveling elsewhere to view the eclipse. Their enthusiasm and curiosity ends up rubbing off on me. v) To add to the excitement, there is some possibility of cloud coverage interfering with the viewing of the eclipse in Rochester. Here are the main pieces of related information I was able to gather: Relevant information i) A solar eclipse occurs when the moon lines up with the sun and the earth on opposite sides of it. ii) We may think that solar eclipses occur quite often since the moon goes around the earth every 29 days and can be found between the sun and the earth once every month (roughly). The reason eclipses do not occur so frequently is that the plane of the orbit of the moon is tilted to the plane that contains the sun and the earth. So at most times, the moon is too high or too low to in the sky block out the sun, or at least to block it out totally. iii) A coincidence that makes the eclipse total is that presently the sizes of the moon and the sun as viewed from the Earth are roughly the same. This is expected to change over astronomical time, as, for example, when the sun expands in size. iv) Stars and planets will become visible in the sky for the short duration (a few minutes) of the total solar eclipse. iv) Cool video taken from space of the moon's shadow on earth during such an eclipse. The most relevant information i) It is never safe to look at the sun directly, as some of the electromagnetic radiation it emits is dangerous to the eye. ii) On normal days, or during partial eclipses, one should not look directly at the sun for more than an instant, even with sunglasses on. iii) On normal days, or during partial eclipses, one should not look directly at the sun through binoculars or telescopes as they will focus the sun's rays and damage the eye. This effect can be demonstrated by using a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on grass or paper; the material will burst into flames. iv) Before and after a total solar eclipse, eclipse glasses should be used for viewing the sun. These glasses are able to block out the harmful radiation, but not if a binocular or telescope is focusing the sun's rays. So the glasses should be the only thing between your eyes and the sun. v) During totality, when the sun is almost completely blocked by the moon, the eclipse glasses can be taken off. Since the sun is blocked off, the harmful radiation it emits will not reach us. Happy eclipse viewing! __________________________________________________________________________________ *Referring to the novel by Arthur Koestler.

Intro A famous saying, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, is that in life the only things that are certain are death and taxes. Since it has been firmly established that taxes can never be abolished, it seems that the focus has now shifted to doing away with death. That's meant to be a joke, but the topic has been considered seriously by the recent book Why We Die by Venki Ramakrishnan, who shared the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 2009. Below is a brief review without any essential spoilers (I hope). What is included The book covers a lot of ground, treating gerontological topics like i) genes (much material here, including on cloning, twins, etc.) ii) proteins (the author's immediate expertise) iii) telomeres ( chromosomal end-caps which have a complicated relation with aging) iv) how death is the price we pay for sex (for this you have to read the book) v) swapping in young blood (literally, injecting...) vi) the relationship between aging and cancer (via genetics) vii) cryonics (works better for lower life forms!) viii) low carb diets (they help) ix) hydra, jellyfish (both immortal) and the 500-year long-lived Greenland shark (natural examples of postponed death) x) menopause (interesting and complex analysis here) The book also refers to a 4-stage plan for coping with death, attributed to the philosopher Stephen Cave, which is worth considering, in my opinion. Where I disagreed (but who am I to argue with a Nobel laureate?) A few points, on which my own meager knowledge on the subject came into conflict with the book's statements: i) At one place the book says that there is no proof that animals are aware of their impending death. Maybe it means when they are healthy, because I have heard as well as read of dogs etc., who have 'a knowing look in their eyes', for example, when they are dying from cancer, etc. This evidence, of course, is anecdotal. ii) At another place, it is stated that we cannot become immortal by continuously swapping out parts. The engineer in me rebelled against this conclusion; yes, we don't know how to implement this now, but there's hope - horse valves and pig kidneys are already here and artificial organs are projected to come in 20-30 years. iii) In the chapter on the implications of immortality - or at least longer life spans - the book bemoans the fact that tenured faculty in the US work till even their nineties, though they are (apparently) no longer as creative and bold as their junior colleagues. This holds up the next generation of scientists from getting jobs. I will write more extensively about this on another post, but for now I must register a vote against the motion - please let us enjoy tenure, an earthly form of immortality. Summary The book concludes that we live in an interesting time, when immortality, though hardly achievable, is beginning to reveal its secrets to us: in academia, hundreds of thousands of research articles have been published in the last decade, while the antiaging industry has received tens of billions of dollars of investment aimed at pushing the current 120-year limit on the human lifespan. The book is: based on science, well organized, authoritative, thought provoking, and funny (esp. when describing the anti-aging industry + market). I was looking for an accessible but 'popular' text that I could use as a framework for studying the topic, and I think this book suits the purpose well. I intend to study it further, when I have the time to get some more biology under my belt.

What happened - or rather did not - in Rochester, NY The sun was out and shining the day before as well as the day after the eclipse (in fact it was kind of visible through the cloud cover about an hour before and afterwards), in Rochester, NY, but on Monday April 6 the eclipse got eclipsed - completely clouded out. I had friends who had come in from out of town and we decided to go up to Lake Ontario (about 20 minutes drive from my home) for the viewing, trying to make the best of a disappointment, having reconciled ourselves to not being able to see the sun (or the moon). Still, I would have to say that the eclipse was pretty spectacular. The way the darkness came on was quite dramatic, and its quality was quite high. Almost the entire sky was blacked out, except for a thin sliver of the horizon. If you did not look at that part of the horizon, it was quite easy to believe that it was about 10pm at night, rather than 3pm in the afternoon. The clouds were thick enough that no stars were visible. But it was dark enough that the automated lighting on several of the buildings next to the lake came on, and then was switched off manually (the city had already disabled the automatic lighting downtown, where a big crowd was assembled to see the eclipse; the mayor said about 300,000 people were expected to come to Rochester for the viewing, I don't know if that was the number that actually came). The fall in temperature was very noticeable. The passage of the darkness over about 3 minutes and its lifting was also quite amazing to watch. In general, I thought it was remarkable that the moon subtended an angle large enough to block out almost the entire sun (for those who could see it) as well as travel fast enough for it to slide past the sun in only a few minutes (both of these bodies are quite large). Elsewhere Pretty soon afterwards I received many spectacular images on my phone from relatives and friends who had succeeded in viewing both the sun and the moon. Some relatives had gone to Quebec. Some friends drove down to Erie, Pennsylvania where the cloud cover was predicted to be less than in Rochester. 5 minutes before the eclipse a black cloud covered the sun, so they jumped back in their car and drove a couple miles further so they could see the sun clearly. Eventually, they succeeded in watching the eclipse. Friends in NYC sent me pictures of the partial eclipse. RIT did not close for the eclipse but distributed eclipse glasses and asked the professors to use discretion in scheduling classes. I canceled class on Monday and thought at first, since the eclipse had not shown up in its full glory in Rochester, that I had simply lost a slot for covering course material. However, when I took a poll on Wednesday in class, a large number of students indicated that they had seen the full eclipse, as they had gone to Vermont and other places. So that made me feel better about not everything being in vain. The future For those who were disappointed, like me, the next total solar eclipse visible in the United States will be on August 23, 2044. Too far away? The next total solar eclipse outside of the United States will occur on August 12, 2026. This one will be visible in Russia, Greenland, Iceland and Spain. The duration of the totality will be 2 minutes, 18 seconds. Total solar eclipses occur every year and a half or so - though some of them can only be viewed under extreme conditions, such as from the Arctic - and some others than the ones mentioned can be found through the link provided above.

Intelligence The question of how to characterize intelligence has always been of interest, perhaps never more so than now with things like AI coming to the fore. I cannot prove that I am intelligent - in fact most of the evidence so far points the other way - but as a professor I find myself constantly required to gauge other people's intelligence. For example, I have to figure out how intelligent the student or postdoc I am talking to is so I can decide what level to teach or guide them at. I have to figure out the intelligence of my colleagues and peers so I know when my understanding has run out and I can use help from them. I have to figure out the intelligence of the top professionals in my field - some of them Nobel laureates! - so I can learn from their way of thinking as best as I can. Intelligence and Information In this post I will consider a restricted aspect of intelligence, which has to do with information. In conducting my daily business, I find intelligence often to be correlated with the possession of information. I don't mean this in a trivial way - as in concluding that one who has more information is necessarily more intelligent. Even awareness of ignorance is a kind of information, and intelligent people seem to possess this awareness in an acute way (they are not only aware of what they themselves don't know, but by talking to other people can quickly figure out the limitations of their knowledge). This kind of awareness seems to be very important in the type of scientific research I perform. For example, since the aim of such research is find new (and interesting and/or useful) things, it is first of all very important to distinguish between what is known and what is not known. This is because there is no publication benefit in replicating what has already been done (though there can be a learning benefit). Going even further, much of the scientific research I do is in fact about locating interesting questions the answers to which are not known, but which are now ripe to be investigated with some existing box of tools. When I write grant proposals, they address exactly such questions. As any researcher with experience knows, the identification of such questions is an art, in which skill can be acquired over time with study, thought and application. Below I will list a couple of other instances of how information and intelligence play out with each other. Examples mundane and exotic i) Ignoring other peoples' knowledge - bad idea : We often make the very human mistake of assuming that our personal experience is universal, especially if it is intense. I often have people in my office saying such and such result cannot be proved (I happen to know the paper where it has been) because they tried and failed, or a certain calculation can only be performed to so many places of accuracy (I know graduate students who could do better). I am sure I make similar claims myself, on occasion. In this case we are not aware of others' knowledge, and perhaps just as (if not more) importantly, of our own ignorance. In either case, this is not intelligent behavior, and can in fact be harmful when we send people away with a wrong impression of what is possible, e.g. telling them 'you can't do this'. The culprit is often our 'common sense', which Einstein used to call 'a layer of prejudices', and which in scientific research translates into the dogma of the particular individual, group, lab, or field. Amusing anecdote: Einstein apparently complained to Eddington that English astronomers were slow to accept relativity. 'Yes,' said Eddington, 'They have too much common sense.' ii) Ignoring other peoples' knowledge - good idea: This example comes from another story, though the punchline is probably apocryphal. Lev Landau, one of the all-time great theoretical physicists, had predicted that a certain type of material (antiferromagnets) should not exist. Louis Neel still looked for it and found it. When they asked him why he had kept looking, though Landau had declared against its existence, Neel said, 'Thank God I am not that smart.' A subtle example of when disregarding others' knowledge can be an intelligent move.

This post is about the role of argument in scientific research, both ideal and practical. The topic, of course, is a big one, and here I will just present some brief thoughts based on my limited experience. The ideal case Ideally, argument has a seminal role to play in scientific research. For example: i) In principle, since all knowledge is provisional, it should always be open to argument. ii) Free and fair argument is one of the pillars of progress in scientific research. One cannot suppress argument by putting on the guise of being an unchallengeable authority. iii) One of the outstanding pleasures of performing scientific research is 'finding a good argument', which is often the crucial prelude to performing a calculation or experiment that fleshes out the argument quantitatively. The practical case Let us contrast with the above what happens in practice. In my own experience: i) Intelligent people typically do not argue too much. They get what you are saying very quickly, and they are very good at conveying what they are trying to say to you. Also, they are very good at deciding to stop the argument at a point where it is clear that not enough is known about the topic to make further discussion meaningful. ii) Since resources like time, money, intelligence and patience are always limited, in practice argument can be supported only to a finite extent. For example, it is not possible to sustain someone who questions everything. (I once had a freshman in my office, not yet mentally out of early teenage, who replied to each of my explanations with a "But why?". But such an attitude is not limited to the scientifically immature. I have seen colleagues in the field who love having meaningless arguments, where you oppose your conversational partner(s) on principle, an exercise that I could never derive any benefits from; it also stops being amusing rather quickly). iii) The choice of having an argument is often abused for blowing off steam, for convincing oneself that one is being heard (i.e. respected), for talking past the person being argued with. None of these actions are productive, and are in fact often counter productive. iv) Argumentation can be a devastatingly effective research tool in the hands of those who are able to combine it with a lack of ego and an ability to follow up each of their criticisms with a constructive suggestion. Typically an argument with such a person is extremely productive and creative, yielding unexpected insights, fresh perspectives, and new routes to knowledge. With such a person, one can start from a vague hunch, and rather quickly end up with a paper. The psychologists call this working off the 'top' of one's intelligence: you take the best of what your opponent has offered you and build something on it (instead of just being purely critical or faultfinding). This is a type of constructive interference. This is the kind of argumentation I like to preach and practice. Some further thoughts I have always been curious about the evolutionary aspects of argumentation. Generally, the phenomenon of argumentation can be thought of as Darwinian, a mechanism evolved for the purpose of 'arguing' our survival. Perhaps I can clarify this using some mundane examples: When we know something well, we usually don't raise our voice while discussing it. There is no need to argue. For example: everyone is convinced of the existence of the sun. The statement is at the level of a fact. No one requires an extensive proof of it, or a vigorous argument about it. [Seems like a relevant example, considering the upcoming eclipse on April 8 -:)]. However, when we do not know something well enough to prove it, we compensate by raising our voice automatically. For example: take your favorite political philosophy. In this light, the vociferousness of an argument may be taken to be indicative of the level of ignorance of the parties involved (Ambrose Bierce says something like 'To be sure is to be mistaken at the top of your voice'.) I suspect this is an evolutionary mechanism. Nature enables us to compensate for our ignorance by giving us more amplitude in our voice boxes. The evolutionary benefit of this is that confidence usually wins (even when based on ignorance). (There is some research that shows confidence helps us optimize behavior such as resource allocation).

This post is about some questions posed to me, that I have collected over time, which relate to the way physics research functions - or perhaps the way it does not function. I hope you will find some of them useful. (Students mostly call me Prof. B to get around my polysyllabic last name, so I have used it everywhere below. Microsoft and Apple play a perhaps unexpected but useful role in this conversation): Prof. B, I contacted an author of a paper I read as part of our research. Hope that was ok? This happens when I forget to inform a starting undergraduate or graduate student that my permission is required for contacting any one outside our group regarding research. The student's ask is not appropriate because research is a competitive endeavor. I would not like it to be known outside the group that we are working on any subject because that may give away a competitive edge, rob us of the element of surprise, and by broadcasting our aims, alert other people that the topic may be of interest. Likewise, few researchers when contacted by other people in the field will give away their hard-won expertise and knowledge for free. It's a little bit like working at Apple and sending an email to Microsoft asking a question about how a Graphical User Interface works or can be developed. They are not likely to answer, and will likely sue for copyright infringement. Such lawsuits are unusual in physics research, but the idea is the same. 2. Prof. B, I am an undergraduate student from India. I would like to co-op over the summer with your group, but even if you cannot offer me a position, can you pay my airfare to the US? If this request does not sound strange to you, the battle may have already been lost. Quite apart from the facts that I do not accept international co-ops in my group and that there is no mechanism for funding such travel at my university even for other international hires I make, the ask is inappropriate because there is no reason I should financially support a person who is not going to work for me. To continue using the example cited above it's like asking someone at Microsoft to pay for the plane ticket even though the applicant is not going to intern with them. 3. Prof. B, I am a graduate student finishing my PhD. Can I do a postdoc with you so I can be closer to my collaborators who are in the city next to yours? Again, why would I support you with pay and time if you are going to use those resources to render services to other parties? That's like asking Microsoft to pay your salary while you work with Apple. 4. Prof. B., I am a student at another university who has been reading up on some of your recent research. Are you currently planning projects in a similar direction? If you were to take on any student, what are some possible projects you would assign them? I am asking because, before starting any actual PhD position I am considering starting a research project. Please answer at your suitable time. Have a nice day and a nice weekend ahead. This ask is inappropriate because the student is not part of my research group. Because research is competitive and the student is not my collaborator, I would definitely refuse to reveal which projects I am planning. But the inappropriateness of the ask goes beyond that. I am actually paid to execute, and am already completely swamped by, the tasks that this student is asking me to perform. If I share an idea about a project I would assign to a student, that idea becomes useless for my own students, as this correspondent will be working on it. Collaboration between this student and my own is not a realistic idea, as there is no accountability on the part of the external student - as long as they are not attached to a member of the faculty at their institution vis-à-vis this project. For example, there is no guarantee that the external student will not discuss - or collaborate further - with other people on my idea. As I mentioned above, I do not have the time to guide the outside student should they have questions about the project proposed, especially as they develop the idea, concretize the model, start calculating the observables, etc. Even more importantly, I do not have the formal authority to execute these tasks. At the beginning of every academic year, I agree upon a Plan of Work with my department head, and the work performed is confirmed at the end of the year through the Annual Appraisal. Since the university hires and pays me to instruct and supervise the research of its own students, it would be considered a conflict of interest if I were to supervise the research of students of another university: why would Microsoft pay me to train employees at Apple? 5. Prof B., Thanks for taking me on for a summer project. I would like to make some extra money over what you are paying me for the summer, and so I have written to the department head if he could assist in this matter. Hope this was ok? The ask is inappropriate for several reasons. In the first place, the student agreed to the salary I proposed before he signed on, and did not give me any indication that it was not acceptable. Second, he should have discussed with me before approaching the department head, if at all (in army language this was a violation of the chain of command). Third, the department has no obligation to help him; in fact the first thing the head is going to do is call me and ask if the salary needs to be raised; and if so, to provide the needed amount from my funds. I get a lot of these questions, actually, so someday I may post a follow up.