An introduction to everything here!
Welcome to the first post on this blog! This website and the accompanying blog has been a long time coming but faced regular delays due to my procrastination. In this post, I aim to cover all the need-to-know stuff about this blog so that the visiting audience knows how to get around. The name of the blog itself is inspired by the educational philosophy of autodidactism. To paraphrase from Wikipedia,
Autodidactism is the practice of education without the guidance of teachers. Autodidacts are self-taught people who learn a subject through self-study. The process may involve, complement, or be an alternative to formal education. Formal education itself may have a hidden curriculum that requires self-study for the uninitiated.
With the above definition, I am hopeful that the reader has an inkling of what I am trying to achieve here. This blog’s primary function is as a resource for people interested in the beautiful interplay of the natural sciences and mathematics known to us as physics. Posts on this blog may range from a variety of online and open sourced educational content as recommendations to introductions to various topics and tools relevant to physics. Of course, this is not limited to just mathematical machinery, computational modelling or experimental details, but also philosophical, historical and social considerations. The blog will also occasionally feature educational content from colleagues and students of mine that fit the scope and vision of this endeavour. As a secondary function, the blog would also have a fair bit of my brand of whimsy and some of my travel diaries because we all need some humor and a nice backdrop to engage in productive endeavors lol. Anyhow, much of this website is still fairly empty, which include mainly my work prior to the summer of 2025.
Now, I do see the irony in an educator such as myself making a blog for autodidacts and the apparent contradiction of what autodidactism is, to my vocation. First, to address the apparent contradiction, this blog does not aim to teach but rather seeks to expose the uninitiated that may have landed here by chance or algorithmic design. The website in fact has a separate page that is dedicated to my teaching for my own students and those that may be too lost on their own to meet the autodidactic philosophy head-on. So, why does an educator such as myself endorse such a philosophy? It is a bit strange especially in this day and age with AI models running amok with hallucinated or biased content and social media algorithms that incentivise a confirmation bias. Educators such as myself should in fact be taking an active role to guide as opposed to leaving it all upto individual discretion! Well that is precisely the point of this blog. The hope is that the expositions here to both technical and social aspects through the lens of the physical sciences will inculcate critical thinking that re-inforces one’s individual discretion over the sway of heavily biased narratives.
That is about it with the introduction. The tags on the landing page of the blog can take you to an archive of posts that are tagged as such if your interests are narrow. For the complete beginner who wishes to study the physical sciences, a starter pack will soon be put up on this post.