Update, Some Thoughts, and Future Directions
in Blog on Career, Future, Pedagogy, Teaching, Learning, Tools, Life changes
A brief update on my current directions and ideas for the future.
I have been rather quiet on this site recently. The reason behind this is I have spent a great deal of my free time reevaluating the direction my life has been heading in. As my career is a major, integral component of this life, I have been giving careful consideration to the appropriate areas in which to place my energies going forward.
It is strange how little I have been writing on this blog given that I have some one-thousand handwritten pages of notes and sketches across the seven volumes of research notes I have generated over the last six years. However, I think after this thousand pages, my career as a research assistant at the University of Washington is at an end.
I have left my research group in the Chemistry Department due to a confluence of factors — some of which I may discuss in a later post. Primarily, I have realized that the world of Academic Research is not where my skills and passions are put to their best use now.
I can say this for certain at least in the realm of the physical sciences. With regards to other fields of intellectual inquiry only time and experience will tell.
Having said that, I would strongly assert that my past four years of research and learning at the University of Washington have been highly beneficial to my development as a thinker, creator, and as a person — as one would hope, right?
I learned how to dive into the depths of topics barely covered by any textbook and within which Google held no answers for me. I synthesized and tested new ideas and approaches for solving old problems. Some of these projects even worked and I earned the right to call myself a published author on the subject! (also if you’re interested, the two articles currently in print can be found here and here).
I gained enormous confidence and skills in computer programming — a field I had previously felt very ill-at-ease working within (but more on that in another post.)
Instead of crashing and burning when it came to programming and automation — my fear when I began my studies of theoretical chemistry — I learned to harness powerful automation, simulation, and analysis tools to learn fascinating things about complex, dynamical systems. While writing my own scripts and code from scratch, learning as I went how the various components of scripts and programs fit together, I built up my programming confidence and gained insight into how the processes work inside the machine.
Discovering that I actually enjoyed the creative, artistic process of writing computer programs has been nothing short of an epiphany.
Perhaps even more valuable in the long-term, my abilities to comprehend and convey complex topics to a number of skill levels blossomed. These skills grew and flourished during the course of presenting ongoing work to colleagues. My students opened my eyes to the various ways a concept could be interpreted and provided an excellent training-ground for reformulating technical concepts for audiences of different levels. During conferences I presented visualizations and very concise representations of my work to specialists and nonspecialsts alike in my field. I even won a Best Poster award at one of them, so I must have been doing it well!
I realized that I can do basically anything that I am willing to invest sufficient time and effort into.
So what now?
I wrote the following the other day in my Research Journal (Volume VII !) and felt that it really captures what it was I originally set out to do when I began this journey through Academia:
2019.03.08 Introduction to Volume VII Seattle, WA
This entry serves as an introduction to not only a new volume of my research journals, but also as a starting point for a new chapter of my professional and intellectual life. I have left my PhD studies due to a number of factors. However, nothing shall diminish my desires to fundamentally understand the world. I fully intend to continue my mathematical and physical investigations.
Indeed, maybe leaving the graduate program will free me to consider alternative approaches to quantum mechanics, chemistry, mathematics, and computational tools for such pursuits.
For the interim I may revisit the basics, that is, the basic notions, postulates, and axioms behind the work I have done up to this point. I may also be able to make more time to expand the body of pedagogical materials to help others follow the physical insights I have already gained.
As we enter a world of massive quantities of data, quantum information and ever-faster computation, we will need better, more robust, and more intuitive tools for understanding, communicating, and teaching what we have learnt. The main objective is, of course, to help the next generations of laborers in these subjects to apprehend and implement these tools that we have so painstakingly crafted for ourselves.
We do need better tools for including people with different thinking, reasoning, and communication styles than what is traditionally expected of a “science person” if we want any hope of our lovingly engineered theories and technologies to be applied and appreciated by the world — to say nothing of having them augmented in the future!
It would seem that I have my work cut out for me!
My new directions are centered on the fields of data science and software development, as strongly implied by the above excerpt. New visualization tools for training students in advanced mathematics and physics are badly needed. Some brilliant works in this area already exist but they can sometimes be difficult to find. My favorites are Distill.pub, The Pudding, the amazing work on Nicky Case’s website, Datasketches, and youtube videos on quantum information and coherence. More critical than new visualizations is the need for more intuitive, sensible methods for modeling, formulating, presenting, and expanding on our current corpus of knowledge on quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and abstract algebras.
In particular, I think the abstract algebras could use more bridges to the physical sciences. More specifically, they should be presented not so much in a limited fashion as in many “group theory for X-ists”, “statistics for X-ists” or “mathematics for quantum mechanics” books, but as a unified substructure that can be readily extended upon. This substructure must be presented in an accessible, relatable format so anyone pursuing work in physical or computational sciences may construct their own knowledge networks to apply to their research problems.
I should clarify here that I have gained much insight and absorbed many difficult concepts from the existing materials. Many of them are excellent works and stand as an achievement of human thought that the ideas and principles contained therein could be conveyed at the undergraduate or early graduate levels at all.
Indeed, I myself have struggled with creating relatable introductions to complex subjects — at least insofar as they are complex in their current formulation paradigms.
Still, I believe we can do better if we revisit the fundamentals of quantum mechanics from an algebraic and geometric standpoint. A candidate for this that I have been exploring is Clifford’s algebras (or, as I understand it, they fall into the more general geometric algebra).
Children could be taught set theory, group theory, and fundamental abstract algebra. They could be taught earlier on that the “algebra” as we have all be taught in the United States school system is in reality only one among countless algebras. We could teach them concepts that give university sophomores a run for their money as long as we make it okay to approach the concepts from a number of directions and make mistakes while constructing their own knowledge. Perhaps someone learns better geometrically, whereas another is more intuitive, and yet another may be a naturally analytical sort who despises visualization and geometric reasoning.
We can and should be willing to work with that as technical professionals, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians.
We should be finding ways to teach children early on that they do not need to automatically be amazing at arithmetic or in possession of natural analytic reasoning talents in order to become scientists or mathematicians!
Perhaps this is all very pie-in-the-sky sort of thinking. However I do have some other, rather more concrete objectives I would like to pursue as well.
I have noticed that there are a great number of people struggling with various “disabilities” among university students and graduate students. Often they might struggle mightily without asking for any support or accommodation due to the stigma. Some of them find “hacks” to work around their issues, but at the end of the day, their ability to reach their potential may be hampered by the enormous quantities of energy they sustain to execute these workarounds.
Therefore, I could really do some good in areas like building high-level accommodation software applications and techniques for these students. Ideally, they would be low-impact, allowing them to retain their privacy about their situation while freeing some of their coping energies to be applied towards what they set out to do in the first place.
I have some ideas already in the works, and once I have refined them sufficiently I intend to deploy them into “The Wild” (and by that I mean… GitHub!)
Taking steps in these new directions will require a great deal of study on my end, particularly in the areas of software engineering, data science, and technical visualization. With some skill, and a little luck, I’ll be able to support these long-term personal goals by pivoting over from my academic career into a private-sector career in software, quantum information, or data science.
However, as my track record shows — I am always up for a good challenge!
More fun things to follow soon,
-J.J.R.
