On reading and writing
I’m slow on the posting to the blog these days. Writing on the thesis takes most of my time and energy, and will do so for about another month, after which follows preparations for the actual defence. Also, I’ve been writing less and less in English on this blog. Should it happen that I have any readers out there (if by now I have any at all, considering the infrequent posting) who don’t understand Swedish, please let me know, as I’m considering make this blog Swedish only, except for the few cases when I decide to post something that I’ve written in English elsewhere, which happens to be why this post is in English. This is a slightly modified version of a post I wrote somewhere else on the Internet a few days ago. And yes, it is about my experiences with thesis writing.
Quite possibly the worst, and at the same time the best, thing about writing the doctoral thesis is all the reading of various references. At present I have 54 references for the introduction*. I have read them all at one point or another, some thoroughly, others more sketchily. Still, most of the references are papers that I either read for the first time now (because they contain background material, the details of which there was never time for during the research work) or which I re-read because I really need to know the stuff.
Drawbacks: It takes an infinite amount of time. Anyone who has ever read a research paper in physics or mathematics (quite possibly in chemistry and other disciplines as well, but I wouldn’t know) knows that the average reading speed can easily slow down to ridiculous 15 minutes per page. Even slower if one aims to understand and double check details. All this sometimes makes the writing process painfully slow, as a whole day’s work may in the end result in no more than a page of written text. Another drawback is that I find so many things which I don’t understand or understand only partially. While this must always be so, given the immense amount of knowledge collected even in just one sub-field of physics, I still can’t fully shake the feeling that there might be this crucial point that I have missed.
On the other hand, we have all the good things: I have learned so much about the fundamentals of density-functional theory, optical lattices, the Hubbard model, Feshbach resonances and general theory of quantum liquids that I have trouble recalling the last time I learned so much in such a short time. That must have been during my second and third years as an undergrad, when classes such as complex analysis, classical and analytical mechanics, Fourier transforms, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, statistical physics and electrodynamics made my knowledge in and understanding of physics and mathematics skyrocket. It does wonders for the fundamental understanding and "physics sense of direction" to really have reason to read up on the basics as well as the latest developments. It is also incredible how many things I see in a new and clearer light after having been forced to think them through when writing about them, even things I thought I knew like my figurative backyard. And, while stressful because of deadlines and expectations (real or perceived), there is a serene sort of pleasure in writing, that I very much enjoy.
They say that the best way to really learn something is to teach it. There is certainly a good amount of truth to this, but I’m beginning to think that this is even more so for writing. While teaching forces you to re-think and understand the things you teach and get asked questions about, good writing requires the same, but also gives ample opportunity to read up, think, write, and re-think.
And now it is about time I really got started on today’s writing. The first topic of today: Energy gaps, and how they may be calculated in density-functional theory.
*Side remark for non-academics: The normal doctoral thesis in physics at a Swedish university is a collected thesis (sammanläggningsavhandling), meaning that the body of the thesis is the research papers written during the Ph.D. studies. In addition to these the Ph.D. student writes what is referred to as "kappa" (coat), which is a rather thorough introduction to the subject, research material and methods used and presented in the papers, plus a bunch of other, semi-optional, things such as popular-science summary, acknowledgments etc.
