Still wondering
I am a physicist.
For most of my scientific life, I have followed questions rather than fields.
Luminescent materials led me to lanthanide ions, thermometry and nanoparticle motion. Nanoparticle motion led me to water. And water led me to questions I had not imagined asking when the journey began.
None of this was planned.
One question kept opening into another.
Sometimes the change began with something very small: an observation that did not fit what I expected.
The important thing was to notice it — and not let go too quickly.
Following the Questions
Looking back, a scientific journey can easily appear more deliberate than it really was.
People appeared. Experiments surprised us. Questions changed direction. Subjects that had seemed peripheral became central.
A luminescent material became a thermometer.
The thermometer became a probe.
The motion of the probe brought me to water.
And water became the question.
What looks like a trajectory afterwards was often, at the time, simply the decision to stay a little longer with something I did not understand.
Following the Questions →Water
For years, water was simply the solvent surrounding the particles we were studying.
Then it stopped behaving as I expected.
That small disturbance changed the direction of the question.
I am now trying to understand what luminescent nanoprobes can tell us about the structural fluctuations of hydration water — and what their interaction with water tells us about the measurement itself.
The probe is no longer an innocent observer.
Different nanoprobes may provide different windows onto the characteristic spatial and temporal scales of hydration-water fluctuations.
Perhaps that dependence on the probe can be turned from a complication into a method.
I do not yet know.
That is where the question is now.
What I am trying to understand now →Bridges
Science is made with people.
Some collaborations begin because two people know different things. Those that endure often become something more.
There can be intellectual resonance: the rare excitement of recognising that someone else is seeing the structure of a problem in a way unexpectedly close to my own, and that together we may have glimpsed a way forward.
There also has to be shared ground — a common sense of what is fair, responsible and intellectually honest in the way science is done and in the way people are treated.
I have learned from masters, collaborators and students. And the distinction between who is teaching and who is learning has often become less clear than it first appeared.
Some relationships survive the questions that created them. They become places to which new questions can return — and sometimes bridges that others can cross.
Bridges →I still enjoy the moment when something familiar suddenly becomes strange.
An unexpected colour.
A number that stays with me.
A curve that changes slope.
A result that refuses to fit.
That small disturbance is often where wonder begins: when looking becomes noticing, and noticing becomes a question.
Perhaps that is still what I am looking for in science.