Notes from here & there: essays, verses, and thoughts on science and society

Pursuit of scientific research as a passionate, driven, ambitious and innate curious desire to follow a sequence of deductive or inductive steps for deciphering the working of a specific system (or the universe!) has unequivocally brought our civilization to where we find ourselves today. Outside academic settings, this pursuit is mostly perceived as, in fact is actively communicated, at large, by the scientific community itself, to be a dispassionate, logical and objective set of irrefutable arguments combined with pure intellectual rationale leading from cause to effect, relying, of course, on the verifiable repeatability of specific experimental, or symbolic, or algorithmic steps. This is true. It is the method of scientific inquiry. However, the pursuit itself is driven by passion, ambition, and desire - very human emotions. Thus, the actions of the people engaged in the science, or in other words, the act of the pursuit itself can be irrational, unbalanced, manic and some times...

Writing pedagogically, clearly, in great detail, communicating to your peers what you do, explicitly, yet at times, concisely, makes for good scientific writing. You piece this together as you begin your life as a graduate student. You figure out what others have done, in great detail, then find crucial pieces of (sometimes missing!) information and then start writing about it, pedagogically, in clear detail, communicating to your peers what you do, and so on... Then you grow and start to learn about how to burnish your writing. You write not because you've chased the metaphorical rabbit down the hole and found a whole new world there but because you (or think that you) want to run down the rabbit hole and need financial assistance for that. Oh no, of course you still write for your peers and fellows, but just learn to write a "good" story. The data is important, indeed, yes. But, it needs to easily describe what you do. You learn to write to the audience - more and m...