It’s been a while since my last post. Almost exactly a year (not counting old articles that I kept translating over time). After a year of the Schrödinger (non-)existence of this blog, in which I neither officially announced a break nor posted anything, I would now like to give you an update. I’d like to explain how the break came about and what will change in the future.
I want to keep it short and not tell you my life story page by page like on a food blog before you get to the recipe for quark stars and quantum soup. Because this blog is about science, physics, quanta and occasionally also about life in science, but only rarely about me. Nevertheless, I’m afraid I have to digress a little to explain what happens next.
Out of science
As many of you probably know, I have a PhD in physics. My fascination with quantum physics and my belief that anyone can understand quantum physics if they want to, motivated me to start this blog. In fact, it even convinced me to change my career completely and become a science journalist.
Why I didn’t want to become a researcher? I wrote a whole article about it (not here, but in German on the webpage of Tagesspiegel and unfortunately behind the paywall). In a nutshell, I had three reasons:
- An academic career is (attention, personal opinion:) crap. Not only is it incredibly difficult to become a professor, it’s also virtually impossible to plan. Just thinking about the fact that I don’t know which country I’ll be living in next year made me gasp. Five to ten years in a state of Heisenberg uncertainty? No, thank you.
- I really enjoy communicating science and getting people excited about physics. I started doing this during my bachelor’s degree and it has grown over the years: Science Slam, Pint of Science, magazine articles, this blog. I think it’s important that people know what research money is actually spent on – after all, most of it is taxpayers’ money. On the other hand, a general scientific education is super helpful, for example, to avoid going crazy in a pandemic or being sold useless garbage for a lot of money by esoteric scammers.
These two reasons culminated in the third reason: - A career in science journalism seemed like an exciting alternative that I would probably enjoy as much as research. So why suffer?
Into journalism
This blog helped me to get my foot in the door of journalism. After my doctorate, I wanted to learn journalism properly, so I did a traineeship at the Tagesspiegel in Berlin.
I started my traineeship in July 2022 and if you take a look at the archive of this blog, you will see a clear connection. Writing alongside a PhD was challenging, but writing alongside a full-time writing job sucks. After eight hours of writing, I just didn’t feel like writing any more in my spare time. That’s why it got quieter and quieter on this blog.
I haven’t written a single post this year. In addition to the writing problem, there was the problem of the future. My traineeship came to an end in June. That means my year was characterized by checking if I would like to stay with the daily newspaper, looking for a job, familiarizing myself with the new job and stressing myself out.
Since July, I’ve been working for the c’t magazine for computer technology as a science editor. While I got around a lot at the Tagesspiegel (and learned a lot, don’t forget), I can now finally write about science full-time. Thanks to c’t’s focus, that’s a lot of physics and also a staggering amount of quantum technology (if you’re interested, you can browse through my Tagesspiegel and c’t articles in German here).
What’s not going to happen
My frustration has been constantly increasing over the past year. I couldn’t motivate myself to write about the same topics in my free time as I do in my job. At the same time, I didn’t want to give up my blog. I found my illustrations in scientific lectures – a big compliment! Even if I would be happy about a tiny credit next time 🙃
I have received a lot of positive feedback that you like the relaxed style of my texts. I write here in a way that I could hardly do in a daily newspaper or a science magazine. That being said: Thank you to everyone who follows me here and especially to all the crazy people who have joined this year, even though the blog hasn’t shown any signs of life!
But how do I solve the problem? I can’t say exactly yet. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to write any more long explanatory pieces. I also can’t ruminate on topics that I have already dealt with professionally for the blog, such as the Nobel Prizes. Writing about life in science doesn’t feel right either, as I haven’t done any research myself for two years now.
And the sad announcement for you: I won’t continue translating my posts into English. It was an experiment to translate my content to reach more people and give more people the opportunity to learn about quantum physics and life in research. However, the largest share of my audience is still German and I would like to focus on this. If some of you would like to continue reading, you all know you can use established translators to read my texts in English in almost the same quality ♥️
What might happen
In the future, I would like to try to write about curious news from the world of science. About topics that have no place in a technology magazine. The texts will probably be shorter. But the quantum reference will definitely remain!
If you want updates on my activities, talks and slams, feel free to check out my Instagram– or Bluesky account. There is also a lot of physics, quantum and science fiction content on heise.de – some of it even in English!
With that, I wish you all a few quiet days, enjoy the fireworks and a happy new year!
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