Newcomer?
Let me warmly welcome you at NEQNET!
My name is Dmitry Podolsky, I am a professional theoretical physicist currently working at the Helsinki Institute of Physics, the University of Helsinki, Finland.
My main interests are related to (but not limited to) general relativity and cosmology, turbulence, quantum field theory and string theory, dynamical chaos – everything related to physics and mathematics of systems far from equilibrium. If you are not sure what it is all about 
, I would advice you to check out the Best posts section, but basically what you will find on this blog is mostly about theoretical physics, its methods and their numerous applications – for example, to quantitative analysis of markets.
More precisely, here is a rough classification of all the posts on NEQNET:
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First class of posts on this blog mostly includes posts about different mathematical methods developed to treat dynamical systems in extreme regimes (such as strong coupling). As it turns out, these methods can often be useful for the description of various phenomena in evolutionary biology, sociology and markets. I think those posts could be of interest for you even if you are not a theoretical physicist.
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I also consider this blog as my scientific diary, and another class of my blog posts is devoted to the discussion of problems I am currently working on.
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Finally, the third wide class of posts on this blog includes discussion of open problems in physics, mathematics, biology and quantitative analysis of markets, problems that essentially define what is cutting edge of science today.
Cutting edge science
Genrich Altshuller, developer of the theory of inventive problem solving (aka TRIZ), once made a statement that all inventive problems can be classified according to their intrinsic complexity. Let me follow his logic and introduce here a simple classification of all scientific problems Namely, I claim that all those problems can be divided into 4 categories:
- to solve a problem from the first category completely, you just need to search the body of literature well, because it is probably already solved somewhere by somebody;
- if your problem belongs to the second category – you need to apply some well known method from a well developed branch of science to solve the problem;
- in order to solve a problem from the third category one has to develop a new method in a well developed branch of science, and, finally,
- to approach a scientific problem belonging to the 4th category in my listing, on has to construct a new brunch of science (most probably your problem is interdisciplinary).
Discussing open scientific problems, I will mostly focus on the known problems from 3rd and 4th category from this classification.
Is it readable?
I have introduced quite a nontrivial hierarchical structure for this blog. Any post will belong to a Readability category (Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master Mason and Master Postdoc). No special knowledge or education is prerequisite for “Entered Apprentice” posts; “Fellow Craft” posts will be probably hard to understand unless you possess a college-level knowledge of the topic I am talking about; “Master Mason” means a PhD level, while “Master Postdoc” posts will probably seem interesting only for specialists in the field.
Also, any post will belong to a particular “topic” category such as cosmology, neuroscience, molecular biology and genetics, etc. You can find the list of “topic” categories on the right side of the front page.
How to subscribe…
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and contact me
If you would like to contact me, please find the list of possible contact channels here.
With best regards,
Dmitry.
