PhD students may find my story helpful nirmalyaphysics.wordpress.com/2022/08/13/h...

How I almost lost my PhD

I was in my adviser's office, both of us trying frantically to come up with an idea that could save my thesis. My already-submitted thesis which I had suddenly discovered to be wrong. Let me back up a...

Academic faculty are a bunch of people writing 'Congratulations' under each other's "Happy to Announce" posts till all of them retire.

That is great advice

My article on Henrietta Swan Leavitt, whose work transformed astronomy https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/henrietta-leavitt-standard-candles/

Henrietta Leavitt and the Astronomical Cow Puzzle

Leavitt made a startling discovery transformed astronomy – but for which she got little credit in her lifetime.

Please add me to the physics list, thanks :)

Thanks Jerry for inviting me here and for the suggestions!

Penrose's work started off what came to called 'the golden age of general relativity', whence Penrose and other relativists (most notably Stephen Hawking) proved many general results about spacetime singularities. Happy birthday to Roger Penrose!

Combining tools of topology and some earlier work by Raychaudhuri and others, Penrose proved a powerful theorem to show that under reasonable physical assumptions, singularities were inevitable! Put differently, black holes are inevitably formed when a star collapses.

But no real star is perfectly symmetrical! Solving the exact differential equations for an arbitrarily-shaped star was impossible. One could at best study stars that were almost spherical. Penrose brought a new mathematical tool to bear on this problem - topology.