Physicist, you should have a blog!

Communication with our fellow researchers is at the centre of our work as (theoretical) physicists. This communication takes many forms: talks and posters at conferences, seminars, preprints on arXiv, and paper published in journals. These avenue for exchanges with our colleagues as only for the finished version of our work and the ‘important’ results. For the small interesting results from an unfinished project, the puzzling observations made with (or about) a numerical method, or the inconclusive approach to a problem, there is a single mean of communication: the coffee break. The details, the observations, or the tiny trick that didn’t make it to the supplementary materials of a paper are discussed after the presentation. That’s why it is often said that the most important part of a conference is the coffe break. Sure, these `little’ things are not worth a paper. You could put them on the arXiv, but you would have to write them as formally as a paper. As a consequence, all this valuable scientific information is not shared.

I believe that this is a shame for the advancement of research and, fortunately, there exist a simple solution. You should have a blog. Not a blog on which you commit yourself to write an entertaining/insighful/witty article each week. But rather a place, on the web, accessible to all, where you would write down – in an informal manner if you wish – the following things:

• the failed but interesting attemp at solving a problem
• the interesting observations on the stability/limitations/etc. of a numerical methods
• the benchmark that you’ve made
• this little but extremely helpful trick that you haven’t seen properly written down anywhere
• anything that you know a few fellow reserachers somewhere might find interesting or useful That is to say, everything that doesn’t belong to a paper but is scientifically interesting.

In the humanities and social sciences have Hypotheses a platform that allow you to create a research blog with an ISSN and individual DOI for each blog post (based on Wordpress and it even supports LaTeX!) - making them easily citable. This is great! Unfortunately, we don’t have anything similar for the natural sciences as far as I know.

However, at a time where publishing something online as never been easier I really wish every physicist had a blog. This would allow knowledge to be shared more efficiently, possibly foster cooperation, make science more reproducible. Science is a big conversation, and you should dare to use all the tools we have to communicate.