The scientific person

September 27, 2008

A physicist is not a person in the sense that a physicist is more like an imagined person. Its not just a concept. We do experience him in our imagination. But not like we experience a scientist. We experience a scientist directly, who is a person like any other. But a physicist is not a person. Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr, the well known great physicists were all great scientists. But they were all great scientists in person. Not great physicist in person. We experience them indirectly, even long after their demise, as great physicists. The experience extends, beyond life and death, not the person. No one can exactly say how they were, as the scientist-person that they were neither before their death nor after their life has exterminated. The person has vanished in each scenario. But the physicist being a conceptual person is immortal before life [birth] and after life [death] of any person. If you have seen and experienced “physicists” that itself will prevail for all times, before and after life of any particular scientist, because its a conceptual experience of a person and even if it derives from a particular person it will fit into numerous.

Talking about the scientist that I am, I do not do science per anyone’s instructions let alone anyone’s compulsions. I do it strictly because I love doing it. Because it gives me a sense of fulfillment. A poet gets a sense of fulfillment of his person-self when he writes poems. Thats his urge or inspiration or driving force, if you will, to write poems. I do science because its pleasurable for me to do so. No one can point a gun at me and say, here, you have to develop a bomb which we will explode on our enemy. My sense of doing science is intertwined with a sense of ethics, a sense of ‘No No” to what goes against the integrity of humanity. Its a humanistic way of doing science rather than a compulsive way of doing it. When that sense of pleasure is at odds with what’s required in the practicable world my ability to do science takes a huge blow. When the ability has dispersed and weakened, it does not make sense to embark onto adventures no matter what the urgency is.

To tell you more about me, and these   are personal to me, my most beloved scientists: Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Galileo, Newton, George Smoot [George  seems such a personable person, I have never met him]

Scientists whose life and work inspire me the most: Feynman, Einstein, Galileo, many more ……

Scientists who impress me with their unique thinking: Weinberg [attaboy], all modern day physicists who propounded the basis of quantum mechanics, mostly theoretical Physicists like, Max Born, Heisenberg,…..  Landau,……