I am on Medium because I would like my writings to reach a wider audience, but also because I feel it can help me improve become a better writer. Although as a naturally curious person, there is hardly any subject that cannot evoke my interest, the three subjects about which I feel the most passionate are physics, philosophy and music. I will say a little about each below.

Physics

As a philosophically oriented physicist, I do research in the foundations of physics, an area where physics, philosophy and mathematics often intersect. My main professional goal is to understand the foundations of quantum theory, though I have also done work on the foundations of special relativity and classical E&M.

My overarching approach toward that main goal is to find ways to integrate the concepts of existence and possibilities, concepts which at this time are within the domain of philosophy, into physics. I believe that our understanding of fundamental physics has become so deep and comprehensive that, without incorporating these two concepts, we are unlikely to make further breakthroughs in our fundamental understanding of reality. I find that I often end up having an unorthodox take on certain topics in foundational physics, which seems to be a result of the fact that I am wired a little differently than your average physicist. Whereas most physicists have no problem compartmentalizing physics, philosophy and mathematics, it is very difficult for me to do that. Aspects that belong to different fields interweave in my thinking about any topic, so that it becomes hard for me to separate them. To most of my physics peers, I am far on the philosophical side, and to most of my philosophy peers, I am far on the physics side.

The advantage of this is that I seem to more often notice novel aspects of an issue that have been overlooked, but the flip side is that since novelty implies unfamiliarity, it is not so easy to get others to see what I see. The very notion that we need the concepts of existence and possibility is an example of how what I think is important for deeper understanding significantly differs from what the mainstream physics community thinks is important.

My hope is that as I improve both my communication skills and my ability to use media to communicate more effectively, I can address this problem.

Philosophy

The field of philosophy is vast and includes metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, aesthetics as well as a number of second-order subfields such as philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of mathematics, and so on.

While there is no branch of philosophy in which I would be uninterested, I tend to gravitate most toward metaphysics, particularly ontology, the study of existence or being; epistemology, particularly where it overlaps with psychology and cognitive neuroscience, such as the areas of critical thinking and cognitive biases; and logic, particularly in relation to questions of expressive power in a formal language and the relationship between logic and mathematics.

Philosophical considerations play a large part in my physics research. My usual method is to try to take an idea from philosophy in relation to some problem in physics, and then use mathematics to formalize it in some way so that it can be incorporated into physics. Existence and physical possibility are concepts which currently fall within metaphysics and to which I have already applied this method with some success.

I also believe that in this day and age it is exceedingly important to be clear about one's ethical values and have some kind of ethical system that can both reliably guide one through ethical situations and which authentically reflects one's self.

I have constructed a value-based ethical system for myself which builds on honesty, rationality and benevolence, because the conjunction of these three values in my view tends to protect one from misapplying any one of these (or other) ethical values.

To give some simple examples, honesty by itself can be misapplied when it leads to consequences that my authentic self would consider unethical, such as revealing to the hypothetical axe murderer at my door the location of the victim hiding in my house; rationality can be misapplied when it is used for purely selfish reasons without regard to potential harm for others, such as an intelligent sociopath might do; and benevolence can be misapplied when it results in self-negation. I believe applying all three in tandem prevents these and other misapplications. I even suspect that most, if not all, other ethical values can be derived from some weighted combination of these three, but exploring this in depth is a project that will have to wait for the future.

I think the prevalence of belief in misinformation, fake news and alternative facts has at least one of its roots in the fact that most people tend not to think too much about what ethical system to adopt that would reflect their authentic selves.

Music

I am a largely self-taught composer-pianist, having composed around 200 musical works, mainly for solo piano. I enjoy listening to almost any musical style, though I tend to gravitate towards music which is characterized by beautiful melodies. This is also what I believe is one of my greatest strengths as a composer: I seem to have a good intuition for accessible, pleasant and sometimes beautiful melodies.

Musical works have many aspects to them: melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre (tone quality), lyrics, overall structure and most recently due to advancements in technology, sound design.

Different genres of music can be conceptualized by how much they tend to emphasize some aspects at the expense of others. For example, pop music tends to emphasize lyrics and melodic hooks, rap tends to emphasize lyrics, rhythm and sound design, jazz tends to emphasize harmony and melodic improvisation, and classical music tends to emphasize melody and harmony, though for each genre one can easily find works which deviate from the general pattern.

I find that melodies do not seem to be as important in contemporary genres of music as they used to be. For example, I find pop music from the 80s and before generally to be much more melodic than contemporary pop music. This development is not in accord with my taste, but I accept that it is what it is.

My own music ranges over a variety of genres, including classical, jazz, easy listening, Persian and Argentine Tango music, but I like to think that the common denominator of all these is that they possess memorable melodies, If interested, you can hear a small selection of my musics here:

My Compositions (Armin Nikkhah Shirazi) - YouTube As mentioned, I am in general an insatiably curious person, so it is extremely easy to arouse my interest in a variety of subjects outside of what I have discussed above. I am an "ideas" person, meaning that more than thinking about people, events or anything else, I love to think about ideas. I have learned six languages, though I would consider myself fluent only in three.

I enjoy reading many of the medium articles because the large diversity of writers makes it more likely to encounter perspectives I had not encountered before, which is to say, opportunities for broadening my horizon.