Since that day in December 2004, I have never really stopped blogging. I rather found it was something that resonated with my outspokenness, with the kick I got from writing about my research, and with the enormous, inexhaustible topics that I could pick for my articles. Perhaps this was why I was selected - the people of the Fermilab team had figured it out somehow. Back then I was a 38 years old researcher who spent his life between Italy and the US, doing data analysis for the CDF experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider.
I was not very special, to be honest; I was a convener of the "Jet Energy and Resolution" working group of my experiment, but there were dozens of colleagues who had similar positions in the experiment. Somehow, though, those guys had figured it out. Perhaps the fact that I played chess in the Fermilab team, that I had multiple other interests (not something difficult to realize, as I love to talk about these things in any social occasion), played a part. Anyway, that was how it all started.
I spent 2005 writing about one hundred articles for the Quantum Diaries site, which just a month after its launch already received some 100,000 monthly hits or so. I enjoyed it a lot, perhaps even too much. And already that year I made a few steps in directions that were frowned upon. One day I should really write about all these occasions when I pissed somebody off, voluntarily or not, or when I wrote things that were considered not kosher or damaging for the image of the experiment. But I do not want to do this today, as this is a celebration of the good side of 20 years of blogging, not the other way round...
[Below, a screenshot of my page at Quantum Diaries, from December 2005, when the site was terminated.]
The Quantum Diaries initiative (you can still find the site and my posts here, by the way) ended at the end of 2005 (only to be resurrected some time later, but with other players), and I was left with my hands itching to write more. So I decided to keep doing it on my own, and I opened the site called "A Quantum Diaries Survivor" (http://dorigo.wordpress.com). Some other Quantum diarists did the same - Gordon Watts, for instance, Peter Steinberger, and maybe others.
By the way, funnily I just googled "Quantum Diaries" and I learnt that the site run through to 2016, and there is an "alumni" list at https://www.quantumdiaries.org/about-quantum-diaries/ that does not include me! Censorship? No, in this case I understand the list only includes diarists that took part AFTER the 2005 inception year, as e.g. Gordon Watts is also not listed there (but e.g. Peter Steinberger is).
[If you think I am paranoid to even consider that, I will mention that already some 15 or so years ago I found out that they ran an aggregator of blog posts from ex-quantum-diarists, and despite asking for my posts to appear there this never happened... There is a long list of people who hold a grudge against me for my blogging activities, and this is just one of the most innocuous outcomes.]
Anyway, from 2006 my own site started off with some 20 readers, but rapidly grew when I started discussing more and more detail of my personal life and research life. And then, after 3.5 years on my private site, from April 2009 I moved the site under the umbrella of ScientificBlogging.com, which later became Science20, this site you are at now. I owe it to my host Hank Campbell if this site has stayed lively, although it does feel a bit odd to look back at over 15 years here!
The blog kept growing in readership steadily until 2009 and even more so when I moved it to Science20 (I kept the site alive for a few years, writing a few posts there as well, but I now see that my last post there dates from 2016, see below). All the while I learned that the trick is to let your readers see through who you are, what you eat for breakfast, what you love and what you hate, etcetera, with all the shades of grey in between. This is good, for me, as I have never had any privacy issues, so I wrote about anything I cared about with the same enthusiasm as with physics, and never spared gory detail about anything, even when it trespassed decency - just for the fun of it!, e.g., I went as far as to say how often I masturbated, or disclosing other completely tasteless and useless pieces of information.
[Below, a screenshot of the current page of the wordpress site, still with the sad 2016 post I wrote when I lost a friend and colleague due to a tragic home accident.]
That was not meant to gain readership -rather, it reflected my being totally unconcerned with what people think about me: if you want, a "subtle art of not giving a f***" ante litteram. My blog was for me like an exhaust valve sometimes, some other times a place for deep reflections in open air, or a place to rant or to brag. In a word, it was indeed a diary! But while probably this extra content was not of the interest of many readers, who rather sought clear descriptions of physics results or an insider's view of experiments in particle physics, it also made it more true. And it was sort of an experiment for me, to try and see whether I could entice my readers to entertain in discussions in the threads. I was flippant, abrasive, or just silly at times, so there was a little bit for everybody.
As I said earlier, the above uber-frankness and transparency/obscenity created a lot of trouble in some cases, and one of the outcomes was some form of self-censorship I ended up involuntarily applying to my own writing. Or maybe I have grown old in the process, and thus less interesting, less bold, less readable. But the blog stays alive to this day, thanks to the support of Hank Campbell and Science2.0. To be honest, I am getting a honorarium for writing here, and to be really, really honest, I doubt I would have kept blogging until now if that contract were not there. Or maybe I should rather put it this way: having agreed to write here for a fee is a motivation for keeping my word, so I keep writing... Take it the way you prefer.
Besides making a buck or two, I have to also say that blogging has really made me grow in many ways. As a scientist!, first of all, as it put me in touch with theorists, colleagues around the world, and other scientists with whom I would have never had a chance to interact otherwise. I am serious - this blog has been a communication vehicle for me. Also, by subscribing to the task of explaining physics to laypersons, I had to study! There was a time when I wrote a post per day, and my day would start in the Cornell Arxiv, where I would search for new things to write about. I learned a lot!
Second, I met a few friends who have stuck. I will not name them here, as I would then need to make a ranking of sorts and I do no feel like it. But that is a real treasure trove and I would write 2000 more posts here to have the privilege of meeting these people anew!
And to continue writing about the upsides, I cannot avoid mentioning a few additional perks. Through the blog I got invitations to speak at conferences or give seminars; I got invited to talk at a TEDX event, something that would have hardly happened before, and something that gave me a chance to blabber in front of a 1000-strong audience (embarassingly enough, my poor performance was recorded and there is still footage around). I got editorship roles for scientific journals that were initiated from my connections with people who read my column. I won a 2.4M euro grant also thanks to the fact that the reviewers were strangely enough among the minority of people who praised my blogging activities. And I could continue.
But let me not continue. Rather, as a way to celebrate these 20 years in a proper way, during the next few weeks I will re-post in this column some of the articles that for a reason or another have become landmarks of this 20 year long activity. Some will be chosen for their scientific interest and/or supposed clarity of explanation, others for the controversy they raised, others still for yet other reasons I may or may not wish to disclose ;-) .
So stay tuned if you care to see what the selection is!
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