Profile
Cesar Lopez-Monsalvo
Congratulations to Kate and Emily! Thanks to all who voted for me! And thanks to the IAS team, it was fantastic taking part of this!
My CV
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Education:
A-levels equivalent in Mexico
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Qualifications:
UNAM (Mexico) BSc Physics 1999-2006, Imperial College London MSc Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces 2006-2007 and University of Southampton PhD Mathematics 2007-2011.
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Work History:
UNAM (Mexico) and University of Southampton
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Current Job:
Visitor Researcher
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Although I am something between a physicist and a mathematician, science of all kinds become part of your everyday life. You simply cannot help it. It is not like counting the minutes to get away from a boring office and do something else, although we like and do many other things. There is always something around you that makes you think; when you wake up, when you take a shower, when you walk around, when you are actually doing work. It becomes simply the way you understand the world…and that is what we do everyday: trying our best to understand the world…although many times we may get it completely wrong. Being wrong is an essential part of being a scientist. But you have to be clever to realise that you missed it in the first place.
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My Typical Day:
Try to understand why the idea that just flew into my mind is true
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A lot of the work of a theoretical physicist (a person who likes to think about experiments but when is actually in a lab those never seem to work) is simply to think about stuff but in a slightly different way. When we look at something and try to understand how does it work, or why does it happen, we may think of many things. When we believe we have an answer, before telling it to someone else, we usually try to convince ourselves that it is true. That is actually the hard bit. There are many ways to fool ourselves so we must be very concious that we are not cheating. There won’t be anyone there to tell us right away that we got it wrong. A very useful way to try our ideas was most remarkably used by Einstein himself. It is simply thinking about an experiment (even if it is very difficult to actually make it) to test the wildest consequences of our ideas. If they do not contradict something we already knew, then we might be in the right track.
So, my typical day consists of trying to understand that the idea that just flew into my mind is true, or at least find out how far can I go with it before getting it completely wrong. No timetables at all.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Public lectures on gravity and the flow of time.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Free spacetime traveller
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Yes, I had some issues with the `long-hair’ rules they had and some other minor stuff.
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Muse, Radiohead, Regina Spektor, Nouvelle Vague, Melanie Pain…depends what I am doing….
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
Partly a dream and partly a wish.. I have always wanted to create/invent/ a time machine. I reckon that would sort out the other two wishes…whichever they might be.
Tell us a joke.
There are three kinds of mathematicians: those who can count and those who can’t.
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