Category: biography

Why write interesting papers ?

A lesson I keep learning from Daan Frenkel: write interesting research papers. Thanks to Arghya Dutta (on X), who brought the paper below to my notice. https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.4440

Sometimes, interesting, well-written papers can have a deeper impact. Even otherwise, it would add clarity.

Scholarship + interesting writing >>>> prestige of the journal.

Don’t worship journals.

A common question when I say so is: what about academic assessment for jobs and promotion?

My answer is that academia (still) values consistent, scholarly output in reasonable journals.

It is very hard to reject scholarship. Aim for this as it is under your control.

Excerpt from Isaacson’s interview

photo : wikicommons

Walter Isaacson is a legendary biographer who has written great books on Einstein, Leonardo, Doudna, Jobs, Musk and many more. His work is remarkable because he blends depth and breath very efficiently. Recently, I came across an interview of his, and the below excerpt is worth reading :

HUMANITIES: For Einstein, you had to grapple with a large number of very technical subjects, and various language barriers, but still produced a generously sized and highly readable book about the most famous physicist of the twentieth century. How do you get so much work done, while also punching in at the office?

ISAACSON: I don’t watch TV. If you give up TV, it’s amazing how many hours there are between 7:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. in which you can do writing. More importantly, I work with a lot of people, Brian Greene, Murray Gell-Mann, people I knew who were tutoring me in physics.

When I tackled Einstein, I realized that science is totally beautiful. Nonscientists are often intimidated by it, but it’s not as hard when you can see the beauty in the tensor calculus that Einstein used for general relativity or the beauty in his thought experiments, which help him describe special relativity, gravity, and the curvature of the space-time fabric of the universe. Those are, to me, glorious, beautiful things. An outsider might think, Oh, that’s science and math. Isn’t that difficult? No, science and math can be really beautiful, especially if you have good people helping you learn it.