What’s this about?

This is the very first post of my blog “Matter Meets Topology”, so it’s the perfect place and time to give you a short introduction on what this blog is going to be about and what motivates me.

I’m a scientist and I’ve always been curious and fascinated by science and technology. When I was little, I could never stop asking questions about how things work and why things are the way they are. To paraphrase a famous German poet: I wanted to understand what keeps the world together at its core. It’s this drive that ultimately led me to become a physicist. A theoretical physicist even.

So you’re a physicist. But what does that mean? What is your research about? What do you do all day? I’ve been asked that a lot. At parties. By friends. By my parents. By my grandma. And I’m always thrilled to answer these questions with a good dose of passion and to varying degree of detail. In brief: My research is about understanding the matter that surrounds us, more specifically about a fascinating link of our physical world to a mathematical discipline called topology. In this blog, I’m going to write about this field and about my own research revolving around it.

I’ve come to realize that it’s quite a challenge to break down my research into a few digestible sentences without taking away what actually fascinates me about it. During many years of study I have reached deeper and deeper into the intricacies of the physics and mathematics of my field. The revelations and eureka moments on this path were crucial to getting me where I am today, to obtaining the level of understanding that I have today. That’s why I will also write about the basic physics and concepts underlying my research to give you a tiny glimpse at the bigger picture.

I will keep my explanations simple without any formulas or equations. I’ll try. Promised. I want to give you the experience of bumping into me at a party, having a casual chat about science, and hopefully leaving a little bit of my fascination with you.

So, to begin with, in my next blog post I will give you a general overview of my field of physics by answering the question: What’s condensed matter physics?

I hope you enjoy reading this blog.