My Breakthrough Published Paper

My Breakthrough Published Paper

Created
Sep 2, 2024 12:47 PM
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What’s funny is I don’t have access to download my own paper 😄

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Ok what was such a big deal about this is was not the result but that fact that I was in my fifth year in graduate school (out of seven) getting my PhD. I was was dabbleing in low-energy string theory induced phenomenology in the black hole world. I noticed something interesting and wrote the paper and submitted it to The Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity myself.

It was fully self directed research. I had not yet started working with Professor Lenny Suskind at Stanford. No one knew I was doing this either. It showed up in publication and I was kind of like - “oh yeah I forgot to mention I published a paper the other day.”

This was a bombshell! It is so rare for a graduate student to publish a paper as a sole author and without the guidance of their advisor. I have never heard of another instance. This was so rare it opened the door to me at Stanford.

As always I was more obsessed about what the windsurfing conditions were like at Waddell Creek than anything else to have told people about the paper. Incidentally, decades later, what I have learned is that when I am highly focused on intense work and calculations, such as with my day job in finance, I need to spend an enormous amount of time and energy on other projects to clear up my brain bandwidth for “the real work”

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/9/9/011/pdf