Looking back and ahead

Things must have been less celebratory for everyone around this end of year but hey, Christmas-time is always Christmas-time and the beginning of winter is always formidable (especially for us whose circadian rhythms are on bad terms with autumn). As we slowly move away from that new-year magical feeling and pomegranate-juice cocktails, here is one more list with 2020’s tops: “The best of 2020” in the Ph-word.

I have to warn you though: the picks might be “the best” but they are not really “great”. But you kind of expected this, right?

Of course there is also the news post for December. Amazingly, it was the best month of the year, with a largish number of titillating news from space. You can read all you wanted to learn about them (i.e. without the gory technical details) here.

In more personal sciencey news, I’ve mentioned here before that for some time I’ve been trying to get into science journalism. (Incidentally, this is an idea that occured to me long after I started writing “The Ph-word”; no part of a masterplan here.)

Well, this seems to be going unexpectedly well. My first pro article is out and I am finishing the second one.

The dramatic part: the published article is a follow-up on a piece of news that I found to be one of the most interesting ones of the last years when I first read it (I’ve written here about it at that time), and it was published in Scientific American which is one of the best pop science media in existence. I still haven’t fully grasped this to be honest and I feel exceptionally (and uncharacteristically) lucky.

In addition, since the beginning I considered that article to be very niche; it is an esoteric news piece about the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. But I got a very unexpected warm feeling when I saw that it was well-received on social media and read random comments by people who appreciated it (okay, not everybody did, but let’s not get carried away).

And with this let me say goodbye till next month and wish everyone reading this lots of warm feelings in 2021.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *