Teaching

Teaching has been one of the most important and gratifying aspects of my career and something I simply love doing. After 26 years as a Professor, I still feel the same joy I felt when I first learned the subject - and this fascination is what I want to convey to my students. I compare learning Physics to seeing a beautiful painting,  listening to a great composer or reading great poetry. In each case, one may see the artistry, but to fully fathom the greatness one has to know the context, how colors were used, how the chords come together, prosody.  The same applies to Nature. It entails a lot of work, but it is worth every second we invest in it. As in every intellectual endeavor, there are moments where Physics elicits an aesthetic exhilaration that is hard to explain unless one feels it oneself. A trained eye sees much further than an untrained one. 

I also put great value in writing lecture notes, something I started doing during the pandemic and have not stopped ever since. One of the reasons is that in the last few years I have observed a trend in my students: they are moving away from books towards online content (mostly videos) and now LLM-based chatbots. I am not against these technologies per se, but I tell them that real books (either physical or e-books) are still the golden standard and I hope they will continue to be for a long time. Books have been scrutinized by generations of scientists and withstood what is probably the toughest of all tests: time.   Some might be outdated - and it would be terrible if they did not, for that would mean that Physics has not advanced - but they still have a solid foundation we can rely on. In my case I find this particularly true when it comes to General Relativity. We tend to discard older textbooks because the field has advanced tremendously in the last few decades. However, when it comes to the foundations, works by Einstein, Eddington, Weyl, von Laue, Fock, Møller can stil teach us a lot. And talking about GR, I feel the same way as Landau and Lifshitz did: it is probably the most beautiful of all existing physical theories. The geometrization of spacetime is to me one of the most beautiful and profound ideas of the 20th century.