It's Finally Up! 

Yeah, after maybe two years of existence, domenicdenicola.com is finally going to have some content. I've removed all the broken links that mapped to sections of the site I was hoping to, at one point, fill in with interesting content; now it's just the blog and the résumé. Hopefully I'll get around to putting up the "About" section (about me, about my philosophies, about my interests, about my future) sometime in the near future, but you never know. A blog should be simple enough to maintain though, right? Once it's started?

Speaking of getting started, that wasn't exactly easy. Sure, I could have started something over at wordpress.com and called it a day. But where's the fun in that? It's much nicer if the blog is well-integrated into one's personal website, preferably with a minimum of code duplication. There's also the issue of getting blog software that works with my preferred web framework, ASP.NET: over the last year or two, I've been searching for something that wasn't absurdly complicated or filled with legacy code, and finally I found BlogEngine.NET. Of course, it wasn't perfect, so I spent about three weeks tweaking the settings, source code, themes, etc. But now, it's ready to go. Yay me!

What Am I Going to Write About?

I'm hoping to make this into an actually-interesting blog, in the tradition of those that appear on my blogroll (see sidebar, bottom right). That is, not a diary of my observations of the world or day-to-day life, and certainly not the quintessential "what I had for breakfast this morning" blog, but instead something with interesting and informative posts about specific subjects.

These subjects will probably be mostly focused around physics. And by "physics," I mean interesting physics: quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, quantum gravity, and such. None of this condensed-matter or particle-physics stuff for me; I am definitely not an experimentalist, and in fact am majoring in mathematics so that I don't have to do any physics labs. I recently immersed myself in some quantum foundations research at the Perimeter Institute over the summer, and so have many thoughts swimming around in my head about quantum foundations and related subjects. I thought this would be a nice outlet for me to share my thoughts on topics such as issues in the foundations of quantum mechanics, the physics community, and current events in physics. Of course, there should occasionally be diversions from this diet of physics posts, but the content should still be of general interest and provoke some thought on the subject. Some topics that come to mind might be mathematics, undergraduate life, or something neat I found online and would like to discuss in some depth.

As a sample, here are some things I'm hoping to blog about in the near future:

• Why I like the de Broglie–Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics, and what problems remain even after adopting it.
• The essential division of interpretations of quantum mechanics into four categories.
• The string theory debate from an undergraduate's perspective.
• Career ideas, for my future.
• How I became interested in physics over time.

Doesn't that seem interesting?

A Word of Caution

I am not an expert on pretty much any of the subjects I blog about. I mean, this should be fairly obvious from the fact that I'm a 19-year-old second-year undergraduate student, who doesn't even get any formal education in quantum mechanics until second term this year (which is currently eight weeks away). But, I've done my reading; I have the enthusiasm; and when I don't know something, I'll try to make that clear. For example, I would conjecture that I know more about de Broglie–Bohm theory than any professor at my school, as I've spent a comparatively large amount of time on it (and nobody here even has "quantum foundations" listed as an interest, much less hidden variable theories). But there are tons of people who know more about string theory than me; my knowledge is only slightly above that of someone who's read (and understood) Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

So, with that parting note, farewell! Until next time…