Friday, April 11, 2014

How 5 years of blogging has changed me

Last month marked the 5 year anniversary of this blog. My first post was a tribute to Walter Kauzmann. In hindsight, after almost 1500 posts, I think that was a fitting beginning. Kauzmann represented many of the themes of the blog: careful and thorough scholarship, theory closely connected to experiment, simple understanding before computation, hydrogen bonding, fruitful interaction between chemistry and physics, ….

Reflecting on this anniversary I realised that writing the blog has had a significant influence on me. Writing posts forces one to be more reflective. I think I have a greater appreciation of
  • good science: solid and reproducible, influential, ...
  • how important it is to good science, rather than just publishing papers
  • how hard it is to do good science
  • today, the practise of science is increasingly broken
  • the bleak long-term job prospects on most young people in science
  • the danger and limitations of metrics for measuring research productivity and impact
  • the importance of simple models and physical pictures
  • diabatic states as a powerful conceptual, model building, and computational tool in chemistry
  • the importance of Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT)
  • bad metals as a unifying concept for strongly correlated metals
I thank all my readers, and particularly those who write comments.
I greatly value the feedback.
I do want to see more comments and discussion!

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