Creating a Personal Website

During my first year as an undergraduate student, the most experienced professor of the Department of Physics was my lecturer in the “Introduction to Physics” module. He was an experimental physicist, but he had a passion for teaching theory to freshers.

I remember he was talking about the importance of publishing papers as a scientist during one of his lectures when I asked him a question that made him pause for a few seconds. The question was: Would Newton, one of the greatest scientists in history, be classified as a scientist if he had never published any of his discoveries?

Given that Newton, whose theory that stood as an absolute truth and remained irrefutable for two hundred years (until Einstein), is acknowledged as a great mind in human history, I believed my question was not a simple one, but the answer should be a ‘Yes’. To my surprise, the professor answered a staggering ‘No’.

As an enthusiastic young student, I objected with my own arguments. I never agreed with him on that point, until two years later, after having shared more time with him as he was my lecturer in two more modules.

What the professor truly meant by his answer to my question was that the value of knowledge is jeopardised if it is not made available to others. Its meaning exhausts itself in the moment when the holder dies, and there is no one else to appreciate, let alone apply, that knowledge. Despite all the marvellous work of Newton, he would not have benefited humanity if his findings were lost and all the meaning created by him vanished.

In that sense, I completely agree with my professor. That means we should, despite the tremendous resistance we may experience, share our thoughts, ideas and any views that come as direct result of intentional and focused use of our reasoning and intuition. The importance of expressing ourselves is strikingly captured by Waldo Emerson:

Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1844
“The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression”.

By sharing our ideas and thoughts publicly, we expose them to criticism. We must be prepared to receive approval but also, more often, disapproval, ideally with some respect. Most of our ideas or theories are wrong, or at least not precise enough, but they serve an important purpose: a way to probe into the unknown. They are the exercise of our mind and can be stepping stones towards more correct or acceptable ideas. Sometimes, even great ideas that turn up to be valid later are rejected at first.

Weak interaction
Enrico Fermi’s theory on weak interaction (1933) was rejected for containing “speculations too remote from reality”.

That story and the idea behind it motivated me to create this personal website. While social media platforms are frequently used for most communications today, having your own personal website offers a unique experience. This is especially true when one disagrees with the content guidelines set by platform owners in the social environment they maintain. Despite that, I find it useful to keep these accounts for discovering other people’s work and perhaps interacting with them.

Finally, a word on practical matters. To set up this website, I utilised the Jekyll-based template Minimal Mistakes and made basic use of HTML and CSS to customise the overall appearance and some functions. I like to write my notes and ideas using Markdown in Obsidian. Once the Markdown files are imported into Visual Studio Code, I use Bundler and Jekyll to build the website locally and convert the files to HTML. When I am satisfied with the modifications on my local device, I can push them to the web hosting server using Git. The website is freely hosted on GitHub Pages and naturally works well with Git. The downside of using this free account is the 1 GB storage limit, which can be quickly consumed if you use images and photography in your posts and pages.